Gun Control: A Realistic Assessment

By Don B. Kates Jr.

Editor's note: since the author of this article has several good
comments on this debate, and since he permits electronic distribution, I've
chosen to give the article a home on this site. The only changes I made were
to re-format the original .txt version to .html for clearer rendering.

This article is copyrighted. It was provided by its author and is
distributed electronically with his permission so long as it is not
altered. If cited, credit must be given.

"If you post this, you must include the information that it is published
by the Pacific Research Foundation, 177 Post St., San Francisco, CA 94108
and is available in printed form for $10.00 under the title Guns, Murders
and the Consitution." (DBK)

Don B. Kates Jr. attended Reed College and Yale Law School. In the
Civil Rights Movement he worked in the South for civil rights lawyers including
William Kunstler; thereafter he specialized in civil rights and police misconduct
litigation for the federal War on Poverty program. After three years of
teaching constitutional law, criminal law and criminal procedure at St.
Louis U. Law School, he returned to San Francisco where he currently practices
law and teaches and writes in criminology. He is the editor of FIREARMS
AND VIOLENCE: ISSUES OF PUBLIC POLICY (1984 -- paper bound copies available
from the Pacific Research Institute) and the Winter, 1986 issue of LAW &
CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS, and the author of the entry on the Second Amendment
in M. Levy & K. Karst, THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION,
"Firearms and Violence: Old Premises, Current Evidence" in T.
Gurr (ed.) 1 VIOLENCE IN AMERICA (1989) and "Precautionary Handgun
Ownership: Reasonable Choice or Dangerous Delusion" forthcoming B.
Danto (ed.), GUN CONTROL AND CRIMINAL HOMICIDE (1990).

STATEMENT OF DERIVATION: The materials that follow are partially adapted
from these sources: materials for Prof. Kates' Stanford University course
"American Violence: The Gun Connection"; a paper on women's gun
ownership and self-defense (co-authored with Prof. Jo Dixon, NYU-Sociology);
his papers in the Gurr and Danto books noted above; an essay on the Second
Amendment published by the San Francisco Barristers' Club, December, 1989.

Personal Note

Nothing in the discussion that follows is intended, nor should it be
construed, as denying the social value of rational gun control, e.g.
absolute prohibition not only of handguns but of all firearms, to felons,
juveniles and the mentally unstable; and appropriate prophylactic
implementing legislation and (even more important) resource allocation for
enforcement.{1} Further ideas for promising gun control
strategies are outlined in the penultimate section of this paper.

OVERVIEW

As early as 1976 it was estimated that more had been written on the subject
of "gun control" than on all other crime-related topics combined.{2}
Yet this pre-1976 academic literature was both fundamentally flawed and
severely biased. The bias stemmed from the crusading zeal of academics who,
by their own admission, could "see no reason ... why anyone should
own a weapon in a democracy"{3} and felt gun owners embodied an American
soul that is "hard, isolate, stoic and a killer".{4} Naturally
this bias led the academic crusaders to discuss gun ownership as a social
pathology rather than as a value-neutral sociological phenomenon. The only
admissible study topics were problematic ones: gun accidents, gun violence,
gun ownership among extremist groups.{5} Implicitly these problems were
seen as fairly representing the 50% of American households that contain
guns; nor did it occur to the crusaders that gun ownership might present
issues worthy of neutral or non-problematic study.{6}

Thus, until about the mid-1970s academic writing about guns was
virtually monopolized by crusaders seeking to validate their contempt and
loathing for guns and gun owners. Neutral scholars eschewed the gun issue,
and the gun lobby, though able to exert great pressure on legislators, was
incapable of, and uninterested in, addressing intellectually sophisticated
audiences.{7} However unavoidable, this intellectual default was a calamity
for the gun owners. They may hold their views without feeling any need for
factual or scholarly support; but the biased, problem-oriented pre- 1976
literature indelibly shaped the views of many humane and responsible
ordinary citizens who did not own guns.

Yet that literature has not proved persuasive to neutral scholars. Writing
in 1976, policy analyst Bruce-Briggs noted with astonishment that, despite
the literature's enormity, "no policy research worthy of the name has
been done on the issue of gun control. The few attempts at serious work
are of marginal competence and tainted by obvious bias."{8} Likewise
a sociologist has used early problematic literature on guns as a case study
of Znaniecki's concept of "sagecraft" -- the prostitution of scholarship
by partisan academic "sages" who invent, select or misinterpret
data to validate preordained conclusions.{9}

1. Sagecraft Summarized

Lest the sagecraft concept seem unduly harsh I briefly review five particularly
insupportable anti-gun claims (they and others are further detailed in the
body of this paper):

a) the claim that homicide is predominantly a matter of "ordinary law-abiding
people" killing a relative or acquaintance because a loaded gun happened
to be available in a moment of anger --

This claim is contradicted by every national and local study of homicide.
These studies uniformly show that murderers are not "ordinary law-abiding
people." Rather, they (like gun accident perpetrators) are highly aberrant
individuals, characterized by felony records, alcohol and/or drug dependence
and life histories of irrational violence against those around them.{10}

b) the claim that (though banning all guns may not be politically feasible)
banning handguns only would save lives because gun attacks are more lethal
than knife attacks --

In a recent National Institute of Justice survey among about 2,000 incarcerated
felons, well over 80% of those who had often misused handguns said that
if handguns were unavailable they would turn to long guns (rifles or shotguns)
instead.{11} Thus, a crucial issue in any handgun ban is that, while handgun
wounds are 1.3 to 3 times more lethal than knife wounds, a rifle or shotgun
wound kills 5-11.4 times more often than a handgun wound. Far from decreasing
homicide, if a handgun ban caused only 30% of handgun attackers to turn
to long guns, the homicide rate might nearly double; if 50% switched it
could more than triple.{12} Astoundingly, not one academic who argued that
banning handguns would save lives (because knives are less deadly) even
mentioned the necessary corollary of that theory as to the far greater lethality
of rifles and shotguns.

c) the claim that comparison of American statistics to those of selected
gun-banning foreign countries proves that guns cause crime and banning them
reduces it --

Differentials in international crime rates reflect basic socio-cultural
and economic differences that have nothing to do with gun laws. After all:
1) Western Europe has not just far less gun violence but less violence of
all kinds per capita; 2) This difference between the U.S. and Western Europe
was even greater before the latter's gun laws were adopted in the 1920s
and 1930s; 3) Those laws were adopted to control political violence -- to
which those countries have always been far more subject than the U.S.; 4)
As American violence skyrocketted from the mid-1960s on, violence rates
increased even more rapidly in the gun banning countries (particularly gun
violence); 5) In such equally crime-free countries as Switzerland, Israel
and New Zealand there is even more gun availability than there is in the
U.S.{13}

d) The claim that guns are generally not useful and not used for
self-defense --

The definitive study finds that, while handguns are used in vast numbers
of crimes annually, they are even more often used by good citizens to repel
crime (c. 581,000 crimes vs. c. 645,000 defense uses, annually).{14}

e) the claim that there is no individual right to arms because the Second
Amendment to the United States Constitution protects only the states' right
to arm the militia --

Though mere control is constitutional, wholesale prohibition and confiscation
is not; the Constitution precludes laws barring responsible, law-abiding
adults from choosing to own guns for self- defense. A leading constitutional
scholar (who personally opposes gun ownership) recently dismissed academic
obliviousness to this clear fact in a paper fittingly entitled "The
Embarrassing Second Amendment".{15}

2. The National Institute of Justice Evaluation

My condemnation of anti-gun sagecraft should not at all be misconstrued
as an endorsement of such equally baseless pro-gun shibboleths as the obnoxious,
reflexive assumption that any form of control the gun lobby opposes ipso
facto violates the Second Amendment. But gun lobby nonsense does not justify
academic anti- gun crusaders in departing from ordinary canons of scholarship
to indulge their personal antipathy to guns and their owners.

In 1978 the National Institute of Justice funded a review of the whole corpus
of then-extant social scientific literature on gun control (hereinafter
called the NIJ Evaluation). Done at the University of Massachusetts, this
encyclopedic analysis provides the benchmark and point of departure for
all later research in the field. Its senior authors began with the expectation
that it would confirm the anti-gun views they admittedly shared. Instead
it provides an almost unrelieved condemnation of the one-sided problem-oriented
literature of the 1960s and early 1970s.{16}

My purpose in this paper is to summarize the current data on all major aspects
of the gun controversy. I shall supplement and update the NIJ Evaluation
in light of numerous credible studies that have appeared since the mid-1970s.
Predictably, this data has emerged from analyses approaching gun ownership
as a social phenomenon to be studied rather than as a problem to be exorcised
by polemics thinly disguised as academic discourse.

3. Realistic gun control advocacy

Rejection of specious or unproven anti-gun views does not entail accepting
equally specious or unproven pro-gun propaganda. By the same token, realistically
acknowledging that gun laws cannot overcome basic socio-economic and cultural
causes of violence does not at all justify the gun lobby's myopic rejection
of the very concept of control. Rather, recognizing the inherent limitations
of control means freeing it from unrealistic expectations of what it can
actually accomplish. Such realism precludes only counter- productively utopian
legislation: gun laws whose potential enforcement and other costs are likely
to exceed their probable benefits. By rejecting such laws we deprive the
gun lobby of a major propaganda device: crowing over the failure of gun
control to accomplish the miracles its incautious advocates so rashly promise.
One of the most the scrupulous and sophisticated of academic gun control
advocates puts the issues in perspective:

...handgun control advocates have often given a greatly exaggerated picture
of what might be accomplished through gun control. Feasible control
programs might be capable of reducing the overall amount of violent crime
by a few percentage points, and, if so, these programs may be worthwhile.
But handgun control by itself will not make the streets safe.

... the "ideal" gun control program [is] one that does not pose serious
barriers to the possession of handguns for legitimate purposes, but does
effectively inhibit the use of handguns in crime by a method which has low
cost to the criminal justice system and to the society at large.{17}

In this connection it is crucial to disavow a myth that has been perpetrated
by both pro- and anti-gun extremists: that what "control" really
means is reducing -- eventually banning -- guns to all but the military
and the police. Of course the myth is true insofar as its represents the
goal of anti-gun crusaders who deny that gun owners have any legitimate
interests.{18} But that is not what "control" means, either literally
or to the majority of Americans who support it (a majority that includes,
surveys show, most gun owners). The literal meaning of "control"
is regulation, not prohibition. Likewise, what "control" means
to most Americans is reasonable compromise to accommodate both the legitimate
interests of responsible gun owners and the clear social need for rational
control over a deadly instrumentality.{19} Regrettably, the trust that is
essential for compromise and accommodation has been destroyed by the rancorous
vituperation that has characterized the debate over gun control.

4. Respectable bigotry.

We are so inured to the vituperative terms in which the gun debate is carried
on that it may be useful to consider the issue in a wholly different context.
Recently a psychiatrist publicized the terrifying story of her repeated
vain attempts to control, or have incarcerated, a malicious bi-sexual patient
who continues to have promiscuous, unsafe sex with people who don't know
that he has the AIDS virus.{20} Doubtless other examples could be cited
of people who spread AIDS irresponsibly or even deliberately. But enlightened,
liberal people would not jump from the few such examples to vilifying bi-sexuals
or gays or gay rights activists, in general. Enlightened, liberal people
rightly see it as bigotry to blame the wrong-doing of an irresponsible,
aberrant few on a whole group of innocent, responsible people.

Returning to gun control, studies trying to link gun ownership to violence
rates find either no relationship or a negative, i.e., cities and counties
with high gun ownership suffer less violence than demographically comparable
areas with lower gun ownership.{21} Summarizing these and other studies,
a recent National Institute of Justice analysis finds: It is clear that
only a very small fraction of privately owned firearms are ever involved
in crime or [unlawful] violence, the vast bulk of them being owned and used
more or less exclusively for sport and recreational purposes, or for self-protection.{22}
Concommitantly, it has been estimated that 98.32% of owners do not use a
gun in an unlawful homicide (over a 50 year adult life span).{23}

In sum, murderers comprise only a small, highly aberrant (and malignant
and irresponsible) subset of all gun owners. Why, then, is it enlightened
and liberal: to vilify the 50% of American householders who have guns as
barbaric and/or deranged ("Gun Lunatics Silence [the] Sounds of Civilization"{24}),
"gun nuts", "gun fetishists", "anti-citizens"
and "traitors, enemies of their own patriae"{25}, as sexually
warped{26} "bulletbrains"{27} who engage in "simply beastly
behavior"{28} and represent "the worst instincts in the human
character"{29}; or to traduce pro-gun groups as the "pusher's
best friend"{30} and their entire membership as "psychotics",
"hunters who drink beer, don't vote and lie to their wives about where
they were all weekend"{31}; to characterize the murder of children
as "another slaughter co-sponsored by the National Rifle Association"{32}
and assert that "The assassination of John Lennon has been brought
to you by the National Rifle Association"{33}; and to cartoon gun owners
as thugs and/or vigilantes, intellectually retarded, educationally backward
and morally obtuse, or as Klansmen?{34}

The NIJ Evaluation accurately describes how the anti-gun advocates sees
gun owners: as "demented and blood-thirsty psychopaths whose concept
of fun is to rain death upon innocent creatures both human and otherwise."
It is really quite remarkable for such calumnies to issue from people who,
rightly, regard it as egregious bigotry when other bigots: seek to blame
AIDS deaths on gays whom they revile as sexually warped, moral degenerates
who engage in simply bestial behavior; or blame gay rights activists for
AIDS because they lobby against ordinances that would close bath houses;
describe abortion rights activists as murderers, "baby butchers"
and abortion clinics as "merchants of death"; dismiss all homeless
people and welfare recipients as slackers, drug addicted, alcoholic or retarded;
or traduce the ACLU as the "best friend" of criminals and drug
pushers.

The fact that anti-gun crusaders are commendably eager to oppose racism,
gay bashing and other evils they recognize as bigotry does not excuse their
inability to recognize their own bigotry. On the contrary, it compounds
that bigotry with myopia, if not hypocrisy.

5. The Political Cost of Bigotry.

As important as the issue of bigotry is that this incessant vilification
of gun owners precludes reasonable compromise over gun laws. The gun lobby
press faithfully reports the philippics, and reprints the most vituperative
anti-gun cartoons, to inflame its readers.{35} Why would the gun lobby actually
pay royalties to Herblock, Oliphant etc. for their anti-gun cartoons? Because
the gun lobby's purposes are best served by convincing gun owners they are
a hated minority. There can be no greater incentive for monetary contributions
to the gun lobby and fanatic hatred of gun law proposals, no matter how
apparently reasonable.

Gun owners are convinced (in part, by bitter experience) that gun laws will
be invidiously administered and unfairly enforced; and, just as important,
that gun owners are anathema to persons and groups like the ACLU to whom
other American can look for help against mistreatment at the hands of the
state.{36} So gun owners hysterically oppose controls substantially similar
to ones they readily accept for cars and prescription medicines. This is
only natural, given the rancor with which controls are advocated and the
purposes avowed by their more extreme advocates. Would driver licensing
and automobile registration have been adopted if they had been advocated
on the basis that having a car is evidence of moral, intellectual or sexual
incapacity -- or that the desired end is to progressively increase regulation
until cars are unavailable to all but the military and the police? Would
not diabetics and others with chronic illness hysterically oppose the prescription
system if doctors were under constant pressure from church groups and editorialists
denouncing medication as immoral? Do not gay rights activists vehemently
oppose policies (however apparently reasonable), they see as motivated by
enmity to gays and likely to be administered in that spirit of enmity?

Two clarifications are in order here: 1) I recognize that cars, guns and
medicines are different commodities that may require very different policy
responses. My point is only that no policy, however rational in the abstract,
can succeed if those it regulates see it as motivated by hatred, contempt
and denial that they have any legitimate interests to be considered. 2)
I also recognize that gun owners respond to anti-gun attacks no less hatefully.
But there is a crucial difference: gun owners are not seeking to make their
enemies own guns. In contrast, what control advocates do by heaping contempt
on gun owners is forever alienate those whose compliance is indispensable
if gun laws are to work. However satisfying it may be to anti-gun crusaders
to portray gun owners as "demented and blood-thirsty psychopaths whose
concept of fun is to rain death upon innocent creatures both human and otherwise",
the result is catastrophically counter-productive to the cause of gun control.

6. Realistic control vs. symbolic gun prohibition

Stanford Law Professor John Kaplan (until his death, the leading American
authority on narcotics policy) used to remark on anti-gun crusaders' profound
ignorance of guns as technological objects and of gun owners and of why
and how guns are owned and used. An apt simile would be to narcotics regulations
proposed by people so ignorant of the subject that they thought cocaine
a common vegetable and marijuana a gas. This ignorance leads anti-gun crusaders
to formulate proposals that, if effective, would double or even triple the
death tolls from gun accidents and assaults.{37}

This comprehensive ignorance is part and parcel of the anti- gun crusaders'
loathing and contempt for gun owners. Anti-gun crusaders often express their
pride in knowing nothing about guns because it sets them apart from the
barbaric gun lover. Nor do they care that this ignorance precludes their
evaluating the viability and pragmatic value of potential control strategies.
That is not a great problem for anti-gun crusaders because, ultimately,
they are more interested in the symbollic significance of having guns banned
than in establishing pragmatic and effective control over them.

Unlike the great majority of Americans (even a majority of gun owners) who
seek controls for pragmatic purposes like saving lives, the anti-gun crusader's
goal is with the symbolic function of a ban as an official endorsement of
his views and moral superiority and as a concommitant condemnation of guns
and their owners.{38} That their concern is symbolism rather than pragmatic
value is proven by an astonishing fact: it happens that many who are anti-gun
are, at the same time, strongly oppose pornograpy, narcotics, and other
blue laws on the grounds, primarily, that they are unenforceable; yet the
enormous literature they have produced advocating gun bans contains not
a single attempt to show how a ban would be enforceable.{39} Though acutely
aware of the issue of enforcibility in other contexts, anti-gun crusaders
have not even tried to show that a gun ban would stop the millions of people
who think they have both a constitutional right and an urgent need to a
handgun for family protection from keeping or getting one. The anti-gun
crusader ignores enforcibility for, at bottom, his opposition to gun ownership
is not pragmatic, but symbolic. It parallels the "sophisticated"
argument for banning suicide, homosexuality or pornography -- even if it
is not enforceable, the ban symbollizes society's condemnation of this morally
abhorrent excresence.

PEJORATIVE CHARACTERIZATIONS OF GUN OWNERSHIP

1. The Penis Theory--{40}

Reviewing unsubstantiated, mostly "derogatory... speculative literature
on the personality characteristics of gun owners", the NIJ Evaluation
(p. 120) mentions "the psychoanalytic" view that "weapons
are phallic symbols representing male dominance and masculine power."
The idea of gun ownership as sexual aberration has been casually espoused
by such anti-gun luminaries as Arthur Schlessinger, Jr., Harlan Ellison,
Mike Royko and Joyce Brothers.{41} The only serious study endorsing this
view is by psychiatrist Emmanuel Tanay who sees "the need for a gun"
as serving "libidinal purposes ... to enhance or repair a damaged self-image...,
and involving "narcissism..., [p]assivity and insecurity".{42}

There is no viable argument for the penis theory as against pragmatic explanations
for gun ownership. Psychiatrist Bruce Danto rejects the penis theory because
it fails to account for female gun ownership. In fact, 50% of those who
own a gun for protection only are women (especially black women), even though
women are much less likely than men to own guns for sport.{43} To say the
very least, this pattern is more easily explicable by reference to women's
felt need for protection than by feelings of penile inadequacy.

Dr. Danto also notes that the penis theory would predict that male gun owners
would be inclined toward the largest barrel and bore weapons available.
But the respective popularity of guns of different sizes uniformly appears
to reflect purely pragmatic concerns.{44} The penis theory is equally incapable
of explaining other demographic differentials in gun ownership. When all
gun owners are counted (not just those who own for protection alone) survey
evidence shows that

The explanations here are, once again, purely pragmatic; hunting is more
an activity of rural people generally, and Southerners particularly, than
of city dwellers; among urbanites, guns are most owned by the affluent because
they are more likely to hunt -- and also to have the money to afford guns
and property that they may feel the need to defend; most guns are owned
for sport and males engage in gun sports more than females. As to Protestants,
survey evidence shows them more likely to hunt than Catholics or Jews (Protestantism
is most predominant in rural areas); and, beyond that, Protestants and gun
owners both tend to be descended from older American stock, retaining cultural
values redolent of the "individualistic orientation that emanated from
the American frontier...."{46}

In contrast, the penis theory has no explanatory value for these demographic
trends. Are Protestants or the affluent or rural dwellers or Southerners
more subject to feelings of penile inadequacy than Catholics or urbanites
or the poor etc., etc.? In this connection it may be relevant to note that
surveys show gun owners are no more hostile to feminism and the women's
movement than are non-owners.{47}

Tanay's arguments for the penis theory validate only his own (self-admitted)
fear and loathing of guns. He asserts that "The owner's overvaluation
of his gun's worth is an indication of its libidinal value to him."
Because Tanay never attempts to explain what "overvaluation" means,
there is nothing to distinguish guns from the "overvaluation"
involved in having other collectibles. People who do not share the passion
marvel at the amounts of time and money that others who "over-value"
them expend on such more or less intrinsically worthless items as old phonograph
records, musical instruments, cars, political campaign buttons, stamps,
coins and candelabra.{48} Much the same problem inheres in Tanay's evidence
of "narcissistic investment":

Most of the dedicated gun owners handle the gun with obvious
pleasure; they look after the gun, clean, polish and pamper it... speak of
their love and respect for guns.

So, of course, do most, if not all, collectors revere the objects they
collect, cleaning and polishing them (if coins or antiques), encasing them
(if coins or musical instruments) in velvet, suede or other attractive settings,
etc. Are all collectors motivated by feelings of penile inadequacy? Or does
Dr. Tanay's depiction of gun owners reflect only his own narrow-minded inability
to evaluate the feelings of those who love and respect something he admittedly
loathes?

A final point of interest is Dr. Tanay's citation of Freud's view that weapons
may symbolize the penis in dreams. This, Freud says, is true of dreams involving
any long object (e.g. "sticks, umbrellas, poles, trees") but especially
of objects that may be viewed as penetrating, and injuring ("knives,
daggers, lances, sabers; firearms are similarly used...."). This passage
refers to dreams in general without distinguishing gun owners from others.
Dr. Tanay is perhaps unaware of -- in any event he does not cite -- other
passages more relevant to his argument. In these other passages Freud associates
retarded sexual/emotional development not with gun ownership, but with fear
and loathing of weapons.{49} The probative importance that ought to attach
to the views of Freud is, of course, a matter of opinion. The point here
is only that those views provide no support for the penis theory of gun
ownership.

2. Gun ownership as a cause of aggression --

Obviously some gun owners are highly aggressive, indeed violent, else the
U.S. would not suffer hundreds of thousands of gun crimes each year. The
question is: are gun criminals properly considered representative of all
gun owners, or are they a tiny aberrant minority best understood in the
context of the larger aberrant minority of criminals who, with and without
guns, commit millions of violent crimes in the U.S. each year? Based on
the recent NIJ felon survey it appears that criminals who used guns in their
crimes either sporadically or regularly are among the "hardest"
of offenders. Per capita they had committed not only a larger number of
violent crimes (often while armed with knives or weapons other than guns)
than other offenders, but more crimes of all kinds.{50}

Nevertheless the anti-gun "sagecraft" literature portrayed gun
crime as more or less a necessary effect of gun ownership. In a series of
articles Prof. Leonard Berkowitz asserted that guns arouse hostile and aggressive
impulses in their owners. To prove this he conducted laboratory tests supposedly
showing subjects' hostility levels rose particularly when others who annoyed
them were associated with guns in various ways.{51} Evidence of this "weapons
effect" is limited and erratic. Other psychologists have been unable
to replicate Berkowitz's results; indeed, some found subjects less willing
to express hostility against persons whom they associated with weapons.{52}

More important is that, no matter what the results, the design of these
experiments precluded Berkowitz's conclusion that a weapon increases its
owners' hostility and aggressiveness. For none of his experiments involved
a weapon being possessed by the subject, i.e., the person whose hostility
was being tested. In Berkowitz's tests the weapon was associated only with
the person against whom hostility would run. Thus Berkowitz was testing
not gun owner hostility but hostility against persons his college student
subjects associated with guns.{53} Buss, Brooker & Buss did test the
hostility level of both owners and non-owners after actually firing guns,
but could find "no evidence that the presence, firing or long-term
use of guns enhances subsequent aggression."{54}

3. Violent personality or attitude characteristics of gun owners

Another attempt to demonstrate the iniquity of gun owners concluded that
they are "violence prone" -- based on survey data in which what
the subjects actually approved was not illegal violence but the use of force
necessary to stop crime or aid its victims.{55} A more recent study offers
a more neutral assessment based on three national surveys: gun owners differ
from non-owners only in being more likely to approve "defensive"
force, i.e. force directed against violent attackers. In contrast, those
exhibiting "violent attitudes" (as defined by approval of violence
against social deviants or dissenters) are no more likely to be gun owners
than non-owners. Interestingly, the holders of violent attitudes were less
likely than the average gun owner to approve of defensive force (perhaps
perceiving it would be directed against violent people like themselves).{56}

In addition to such directly relevant studies, there exists a substantial
quantity of macrocosmic evidence against both the Berkowitz hypothesis that
guns promote violent impulses and the alternative anti-gun hypothesis that
gun ownership signifies a violent personality. If either hypothesis were
true, it should follow that increased gun ownership would be highly correlative
with violent crime, i.e. the more guns the more violence. Yet the consistent
result of studies attempting to link gun ownership to violence rates is
either no relationship or a negative one, i.e. that urban and other areas
with higher gun ownership have less violence than demographically comparable
areas with lower gun ownership.{57}

4. Paranoia, sexism and racism --

Anti-gun crusaders have traditionally derided gun ownership as a product
of exaggerated, unrealistic public fears of crime.{58} Extreme, unrealistic
fear of crimes may amount to mental illness and anti-gun crusaders do epithetically
dismiss gun owners as paranoid and gun ownership as a "national paranoia".{59}
Moreover, precautionary handgun ownership is commonly held to signify and
promote irrational fears, intolerance and belligerence: "The mere possession
of a gun is, in itself, an urge to kill, not only by design, but by accident,
by madness, by fright, by bravado."{60}

Yet gun owners do not seem to be more fearful of crime than other members
of the general public. Rather, polls and attitude studies suggest that gun
owners may actually be less afraid than non-owners.{61} This lesser fear
may be explained by findings of a study of "Good Samaritans" who
had arrested criminals or rescued their victims. In contrast to the less
than 33% of Americans who then owned any kind of gun, almost two-and-one-half
as many of the Samaritans (81%) "own guns and some carry them in their
cars. They are familiar with violence, feel competent to handle it, and
don't believe they will be hurt if they get involved."{62}

So the charge of paranoia against gun owners seems not to be substantiated.
What about the charges of intolerance, bigotry and belligerence? As to sexism,
I have already noted that analysis of two national surveys shows gun owners
no more hostile to feminism and the women's movement than are non-owners.{63}
As to racism, the result of one local attitude study can be deemed to suggest
that gun owners are likely to hold racist views.{64} But the asserted correlation
between gun ownership and racism is not borne out by the several state and
national studies of gun owner attitudes that have included questions designed
to elicit racist views.{65} Analysis of another national poll reveals that,
while liberals were less likely to own guns than the general populace, those
liberals who own a gun were no less willing than other gun owners to use
it if necessary to repel a burglar.{66}

The NIJ Evaluation pithily summarizes the contrast between
partisan sagecraft and actual social science: ... even in much of the
scholarly literature[,] the "typical" private weapons owner is often
depicted as a virtual psychopath -- unstable, violent, dangerous. The
empirical research [we have] reviewed leads to a sharply different
portrait... There is no evidence suggesting [gun owners] to be an
especially unstable or violent or maladapted lot; their "personality
profiles" are largely indistinct from those of the rest of the population.
[p. 122]

DEFENSIVE GUN OWNERSHIP VS. CRIME

The impossibility of the police preventing endemic crime, or protecting
every victim, has become all too tragically evident over the past quarter
century. The issues are illustrated by the on- going phenomenon of pathological
violence against women by their mates or former mates{67}:

Baltimore, Md.

Daonna Barnes was forced into hiding with her
children because, since making threats is not a crime, police could not
arrest her former boyfriend for his threats to kill her. On August 11, 1989
he discovered the location of her new apartment, broke in and shot and
stabbed her and a new boyfriend. Released on bail while awaiting trial on
charges of attempted murder, he continues to harass Ms. Barnes who says: "I
feel like there is nobody out there to help me. It's as if [I'll have to
wait until he kills me] for anyone to take this seriously...."

Mishawaka, Ind.

Finally convicted of kidnapping and battery against
her, Lisa Bianco's husband was sentenced to seven years imprisonment. On
March 4, 1989 he took advantage of release on an 8 hour pass to break into
her house and beat her to death.

Los Angeles, Ca.

On Aug. 27, 1989 Maria Navarro called the
Sheriff's Office to report that her former husband was again threatening to
kill her, despite a restraining order she had obtained against him. The
dispatcher instructed her "If he comes over, don't let him in. Then call
us." Fifteen minutes later he burst in on her 27th birthday party and shot
her and three others dead. Noting that Ms. Navarro's call was part of a
perennial overload of 2,000 or more 911 calls the Sheriff's Office receives
daily, a spokesman frankly admitted "Faced with the same situation again,
in all probability the response would be the same."

Denver, Colo.

On February 16, 1989, nine days after she filed for
divorce, Lois Lende's husband broke into her home, beat and stabbed her to
death and then shot himself to death.

Connecticut

Late last year Anthony "Porky" Young was sentenced to a
year in prison for stripping his girlfriend naked and beating her senseless
in front of her 4 year old son. "He says next time he's going to make my
kids watch while he kills me", she says. Despite scores of death threats he
has written her while in prison, the prison authorities will have to
release him when his year is up.

Literally dozens of such newspaper stories appear each
week around the U.S. Even extreme anti-gun advocates must wonder if a society
that cannot protect its innocent victims should not leave them free to choose
to own a handgun for defense.{68} This section of the paper is devoted to
analyzing the arguments offered for denying that choice.

1. Police protection vs. the capacity to defend oneself--

Perhaps the single most common argument against freedom of choice is that
personal self defense has been rendered obsolete by the existence of a professional
police force.{69} For decades anti- gun officials in Washington, D.C., Chicago,
San Francisco and New York have admonished the citizenry that they don't
need guns for self-defense because the police will defend them. This advice
is mendacious: when those cities are sued for failure to provide police
protection, those same officials send forth their city attorneys to invoke

[the] fundamental principle of American law that a government
and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such
as police protection, to any individual citizen.{70}

Even as a matter of theory (much less in fact), the police do NOT exist
to protect the individual citizen. Rather their function is to deter crime
in general by patrol activities, and by apprehension after the crime has
occurred. If circumstances permit, the police should and will protect a
citizen in distress. But they are not legally duty bound even to do that,
nor to provide any direct protection -- no matter how urgent a distress
call they may receive. A fortiori the police have no duty to, and do not,
protect citizens who are under death threat, e.g. women threatened by former
boyfriends or husbands.

An illustrative case is Warren v District of Columbia in which three rape
victims sued the city under the following facts: Two of the victims were
upstairs when they heard the other being attacked by men who had broken
in downstairs. Half an hour having passed and their roommate's screams having
ceased, they assumed the police must have arrived in response to their repeated
phone calls. In fact, their calls had somehow been lost in the shuffle while
the roommate was being beaten into silent acquiesence. When her roommates
went downstairs to see to her, as the court's opinion graphically describes
it, "For the next fourteen hours the women were held captive, raped,
robbed, beaten, forced to commit sexual acts upon each other, and made to
submit to the sexual demands" of their attackers.

Having set out these facts, the District of Columbia's highest court exonerated
the District and its police, because (to reiterate) it is

a fundamental principle of American law that a government and
its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as
police protection, to any individual citizen.{71}

In addition to the caselaw I have cited, this principle has been expressly
enunciated over and over again in statute law.{72}

The fundamental principle that the police have no duty to protect individuals
derives equally from practical necessity and from legal history. Historically
there were no police, even in large American or English cities, before almost
the mid-19th Century. Citizens were not only expected to protect themselves
(and each other), but legally required in response to the hue and cry to
chase down and apprehend criminals. The very idea of a police was anathema,
American and English liberalism viewing any such force as a form of the
dreaded "standing army."{73} This view yielded only grudgingly
to the fact that citizens were unwilling to spend their leisure hours patrolling
miles of city streets and incapable even of chasing fleeing criminals down
on crowded city streets -- much less tracing and apprehending them or detecting
surreptitious crimes.

Eventually police forces were established to augment citizen self-protection
by systematic patrol to deter crime and to detect and apprehend criminals
if a crime occurs. Historically there was no thought of the police displacing
the citizen's right of self- protection. Nor, as a practical matter, is
that remotely feasible in light of the demands a high crime society makes
on the limited resources available to police it. Even if all 500,000 American
police officers were assigned to patrol they could not protect 240 million
citizens from upwards of 10 million criminals who enjoy the luxury of deciding
when and where to strike. But there are nothing like 500,000 patrol officers:
to determine how many police are actually available on any one shift the
550,000 figure must be divided by four (three shifts per day, plus officers
on days-off, sick leave etc.). After this calculation, the resulting number
must be cut in half to take account of the officers assigned to investigations,
juvenile, records, laboratory, traffic etc., rather than patrol.{74}

Doubtless the deterrent effect of the police helps assure that many Americans
will never be so unfortunate as to live in circumstances requiring personal
protection. But for those who do need such protection the fact is that police
do not and cannot function as bodyguards for ordinary people (though in
New York and other major cities police may perform bodyguard services for
the mayor and other prominent officials). Consider the matter just in terms
of the number of New York City women who each year seek police help, reporting
threats by ex-husbands, ex-boyfriends etc.: to bodyguard just those women
would exhaust the resources of the nation's largest police department, leaving
no officers available for street patrol, traffic control, crime detection
and apprehension of perpetrators, responding to emergency calls etc., etc.{75}

Given what New York courts have called "the crushing nature of the
burden"{76}, the police cannot be expected to protect the individual
citizen. Individuals remain responsible for their own personal safety, with
police providing only an auxiliary general deterrent. The issue is whether
those individuals should be free to choose gun ownership as a means of protecting
themselves, their homes and families.

Until recently a combination of problematic data, lacunae and legerdemain
allowed anti-gun advocates to claim "The handgun owner seldom even
gets the chance to use his gun" -- "Guns purchased for protection
are rarely used for that purpose."{77} The evidence to support this
came from selective and manipulative rendition of pre- 1980s city-level
figures on the number of violent felons whom civilians lawfully kill. Due
to lack of any better data these lawful homicide data were the best available
before the 1980s. But anti-gun discussions did not mention the grave lacuna
involved in judging the amount of defensive gun use from the number of such
killings: the vast majority of civilian defensive gun uses are excluded
since they do not involve killing criminals but only scaring them off or
capturing them without death. Thus failure to mention this fact speciously
minimizes the extent of civilian defensive gun use. Data now available shows
that gun-armed civilians capture or rout upwards of 30 times more criminals
than they kill.{78}

Exacerbating this problem of minimization was the highly misleading way
in which opponents of handgun ownership selected and presented the pre-1980s
lawful homicide data. Some big cities had been keeping lawful homicide data
since the 1910s. Naturally, many more felons were killed by victims in high
crime eras like the 1970s and 1980s, or the 1920s and 1930s (when victims
tended to buy and keep guns loaded and ready) than in the low crime era
1945-65. For instance, Chicago figures going from the 1920s show: that lawful
civilian homicide constituted 31.4% of all homicides (including fatal automobile
accidents); that for decades the number of felons killed by civilians roughly
equalled those killed by police; and that by the 1970s civilians were lawfully
killing about three times as many felons as were police. Yet no mention
of Chicago or this data (or comparable Washington, D.C. figures) will be
found in the anti-gun literature.{79}

Instead, that literature concentrated on Detroit. Even so it somehow omitted
the following pertinent facts: that in the 1920s felons killed by civilians
constituted 26.6% of all homicide in Detroit{80}; that, as crime rose after
1965, civilian killings of felons rose 1350% (by 1971) and continued rising
so that, by the late 1970s, twice as many felons were being lawfully killed
by civilians as police.{81}

Without mentioning any of this, even the most scrupulous of the anti-gun
analysts, Newton & Zimring, advanced the highly misleading claim that
in the five years 1964-8 only "seven residential burglars were shot
and killed by" Detroit householders and there were only "three
cases of the victim killing a home robber".{82} This is highly misleading
because Newton & Zimring have truncated the lawful homicide data without
informing readers that they are omitting the two situations in which the
great majority of lawful defensive homicides occur: robbers killed by shopkeepers
and the homicidal assailant shot by his victim (e.g. the abusive husband
shot by the wife he is strangling). Had these two categories not been surreptitiously
omitted, Newton & Zimring's Detroit lawful civilian homicide figure
would have been 27 times greater -- not 10, but rather 270 in the 1964-8
period.{83}

3. 1980s data on the defensive efficacy of handguns

In any event, all pre-1980s work has been eclipsed by more recent data which
allows estimation not only of how many felons armed citizens kill annually
but also of those they capture or scare off. This evidence derives from
private national surveys on gun issues. Though sponsored by pro- or anti-gun
groups the polls were conducted by reputable independent polling organizations
and have all been accorded credibility by social scientists analyzing gun
issues.{84} Further evidencing the polls' accuracy, is that their results
are consistent (particularly their results on defensive gun use), regardless
of their sponsorship.{85} Moreover, because the different surveys' data
are mutually consistent, any suspicion of bias or falsification may be precluded
by simply not using the data from the NRA-sponsored polls.

Based therefore only on the anti-gun polls, it is now clear that handguns
are used as or more often in repelling crimes annually as in committing
them, c. 645,000 defense uses annually vs. c. 580,000 criminal misuses.{86}
Handguns are used another 215,000 times annually to defend against dangerous
snakes and animals. As to their effectiveness, handguns work equally well
for criminals and victims: in about 83% of the cases in which an victim
is faced with a handgun, he (or she) submits; in 83% of the cases in which
a victim with a handgun confronts a criminal the criminal flees or surrenders.

This victim survey data is confirmed by complementary data from a survey
among felons in state prisons across the country. Conducted under the auspices
of the National Institute of Justice, the survey found 34% of the felons
saying that

they had been "scared off, shot at, wounded or captured by an
armed victim," [quoting the actual question asked] and about two-thirds
(69%) had at least one acquaintance who had had this experience.{87}

In response to two other questions: 34% of the felons said that in contemplating
a crime they either "often" or "regularly" worried that
they "Might get shot at by the victim"; and 57% agreed that "Most
criminals are more worried about meeting an armed victim than they are about
running into the police."{88}

In sum: the claim that "Guns purchased for protection are rarely used
for that purpose" could not have been maintained by a full and accurate
rendition of even the pre-1980s data; and that claim is definitively refuted
by the comprehensive data that have been collected in the 1980s under the
auspices of the National Institute of Justice and both pro- and anti-gun
groups.

My point here is not that opponents of precautionary handgun ownership are
oblivious to domestic homicide, but only that they are oblivious (or worse)
to the situation of the woman in such homicides. That obliviousness (or
worse) is epitomized by the failure to differentiate men from women in the
ubiquitous anti-gun admonition that: "the use of firearms for self-protection
is more likely to lead to ... death among family and friends than to the
death of an intruder."{89} This admonition misportrays domestic homicide
as if it were all murder and ignores the fact that c. 50% of interspousal
homicides are committed by abused wives.{90} To understand domestic homicide
it is necessary to distinguish unprovoked murder from lawful self-defense
against homicidal attack -- a distinction which happens to correlate closely
with the distinction between husband and wife.

Not surprisingly when we look at criminal violence between spouses we find
that "91% were victimizations of women by their husbands or ex-husbands...."{91}
Thus, the 50% of interspousal homicides in which husband kills wife are
real murders -- but in the overwhelming majority of cases where wife kills
husband, she is defending herself or the children.{92} In Detroit, for instance,
husbands are killed by wives more often than vice versa, yet men are far
more often convicted for killing a spouse -- because three- quarters of
wives who killed were not even charged, prosecutors having found their acts
lawful and necessary to preserve their lives or their childrens'.{93}

In the vast majority of cases a woman who kills a man requires a weapon
(most often a handgun) to do so. Eliminating handguns from American life
would not decrease the total number of killings between spouses. (If anything,
it would increase it since, as we have seen, gun armed victims may ward
off 25-30 attack without killing for every time they have to kill.) To eliminate
handguns would only change the sex of the decedents by assuring that in
virtually every case it would be the abused wife, not the murderous husband.
After all, a gun is of far more use to the victim than her attacker. "Husbands,
due to size and strength advantages, do not need weapons to kill."{94}
Having a gun is not necessary to attack a victim who is unarmed, alone,
small, frail ...[But] Even in the hands of a weak and unskilled assailant
a gun can be used ... without much risk of effective counterattack ... [and]
because everyone knows that a gun has these attributes, the mere display
of a gun communicates a highly effective threat.{95} Of course it is tragic
when an abused woman has to kill a current or former mate. But such killings
can not be counted as if they were costs of precautionary handgun ownership;
rather they are palpable benefits, from society's and the woman's point
of view, if not from the attacker's. Thus it is misleading to the point
of wilful falsehood for critics of handgun ownership to misrepresent such
lawful defensive killings as what, instead, they prevented -- domestic murder.

A final tangential, but significant, point emerges from the statistics on
use of guns in domestic self-defense. Those statistics strongly support
the defensive efficacy of firearms. As noted above, "Men who batter
[wives] average 45 pounds heavier and 4 to 5 inches taller than" their
victim.{96} If guns were not effective for defense, a homicidal attack by
a husband upon his wife would almost invariably end in the death of the
wife rather than in his death c. 50% of the time.

In arguing against precautionary handgun ownership, anti-gun authors purport
to comprehensively refute the defensive value of guns, i.e., to every kind
of victim. Yet, without exception (and without mentioning the omission),
those authors omit to analyze the acquaintance crime to which women are
most often subjected. The empirical evidence establishes that "women
are more likely to be assaulted, more likely to be injured, more likely
to be raped, and more likely to be killed by a male partner than by any
other type of assailant."{97} Yet, to a man (and, invariably, they
are men) anti-gun authors treat self-defense in terms of the gun owner's
fears "that a hostile stranger will invade his home".{98}

It is only by turning a blind eye to cquaintance crime that the Chairman
of Handgun Control Inc. can claim that "The handgun owner rarely even
gets the chance to use his gun." That assertion restates the argument
of Newton & Zimring and the Handgun Control Staff. They emphasized the
unexpectedness of stranger attacks -- from which they characterized it as
"ludicrous" to think a victim "will have sufficient time
to retrieve" her handgun.{99}

As discussed above, even as to stranger crime, this view is supported only
by Newton & Zimring's inaccurate and misleading rendition of pre-1980s
data which is further discredited by subsequent data available today. Moreover,
in relation to violence against women, the assertion that they would almost
invariably be too surprised by violent attack to be able to use a handgun
in self-defense is insupportable. On the contrary, in the clear majority
of instances, the man who beats or murders a woman, and often even the rapist,
is an acquaintance who has previously assaulted her on one or more occasions.{100}
Such crimes commonly occur after protracted and bellicose argument over
a long-simmering dispute. The women's defensive homicide literature shows
that such a victim is almost uniquely positioned for self-defense: knowing
the mannerisms and circumstances that triggered or preceded her attacker's
prior attacks, she has

"a hypervigilance to cues of any kind of impending violence...
[She is] a little bit more responsive to situations than somebody who has
not been battered might be." A woman who has [previously] been battered and
then is threatened with more abuse is more likely to perceive the danger
involved faster than one who has not been abused. {101}

In this connection consider a point that anti-gun crusaders make in another
context, but ignore in this one. They (rightly) warn victims that a defense
gun may be of little use if attacked by robber who is himself using a gun.
The fact is that a gun is so dangerous a weapon that it is extremely risky
for a victim to resist even if the victim him/herself has a gun. A basic
dictum of police and martial arts training is that even a trained professional
should never attack a gun-armed assailant unless convinced that he is about
to shoot (in which case there is nothing to lose).{102}

The very strength of this point about the overwhelming power of one who
wields a gun should have provoked academic anti-gun crusaders into at least
considering a correlative question: where does the balance of power lie
between a victim who has a gun and an attacker armed only with a knife or
some other lesser weapon? Under those circumstances it seems that the victim
will usually have the clear advantage (remembering Kleck's finding that
in 83% of cases in which a victim has a handgun the criminal surrenders
or flees). But anti-gun crusaders avoid the embarrassment of admitting that
a victim with a gun might have the advantage over a lesser-armed by either
ignoring the issue or assuming it away. Those anti-gun analyses that expressly
deal with the situation in which a victim tries to use a gun against an
attacker wantonly assume that in any such situation the attacker will have
a gun himself.{103} In fact, however, in 89.6% of the violent crimes directed
against women during the ten years 1973-82, the offender did not have a
gun{104}; only 10% of rapists used guns{105} and only 25% of non-strangers
who attacked victims (whether male or female) had any weapon whatever.{106}
In sum, the same strong arguments anti-gun analysts offer against the wisdom
of a victim resisting a gun-armed attacker suggest that women with handguns
will have the advantage since the vast majority of rapists and other attackers
do not have guns.{107}

(At this point it may be appropriate to address the old bugaboo that a woman
who seeks to resist a male attacker will have her gun taken away and used
against her. It bears emphasis that this is only a theoretical bugaboo:
the rape literature contains no example of such an occurrence.{108} Moreover
police instructors and firearms experts strongly reject its likelihood.
Not only do they aver that women are capable of gun-armed self-defense{109}
they find women much easier to properly train than men, since women lack
the masculine ego problems which cause the men to stubbornly resist accepting
instruction. Viz. the experience of a police academy instructor who simultaneously
trained a male police academy class and a class of civilian women "most
of [whom] had never held a revolver, much less fired one"; after one
hour on the range and two hours classroom instruction in the Chattanooga
Police Academy combat pistol course the women consistently outshot police
cadets who had just received eight times as much formal instruction and
practice.{110})

6. Anti-gun obliviousness to women's defensive needs: (c) rape.

Anti-gun academics necessarily neglect to analyze the value of a gun in
defending against rape because, almost to a man, they eschew any mention
of rape.{111} This surprising omission cannot be explained as a mere side
effect of ignoring acquaintance crimes. After all, many rapists are strangers
rather than acquaintances; indeed, many rapes are committed in the course
of the kinds of crimes the anti-gun literature does address, robbery and
burglary.{112} But, almost invariably, the "intruder" whom anti-gun
authors discuss is not rapist but a "robber" whom they represent
as "confront[ing] too swiftly" for rape or a "burglar"
whom they represent as breaking only into unoccupied homes.{113}

This obliviousness to women's self-defense in general, and to rape in particular,
leaves anti-gun authors free to deprecate the defensive utility of guns
on grounds that don't apply to most circumstances in which women use guns
defensively. Anti-gun works correctly stress that it is illegal to shoot
to prevent mere car theft, shoplifting or trespass on land (i.e. not involving
entry into the home itself).{114} In contrast, the law allows a woman to
shoot a rapist or homicidal attacker.{115} Also, in some cases, a man attacked
by another man of comparable size and strength may be hard put to justify
his need to shoot; but this is far less of a problem for a female victim
of male attack.{116}

In short, to the extent academic anti-gun crusaders have made valid point
about armed self-defense these points do not apply to women. The anti-gun
crusaders avoid acknowledging this by the simple device of never mentioning
rape, or women's armed self- defense, at all. One anti-gun writer, Drinan,
did discuss rape, albeit not entirely voluntarily; he was responding to
an article in which I highlighted the issue as a justification for allowing
women the freedom to choose to own guns for self-defense. Drinan responded,
in essence, that women detest guns and don't want to own them for self-defense.{117}
This response is both factually and conceptually erroneous. It is factually
erroneous because the evidence shows that currently (though not necessarily
when Drinan wrote) women constitute one half of purely precautionary gun
owners. It is conceptually erroneous because freedom of choice is a residual
value even as to things that many or most people do not now want to choose,
and even if they may never want to.

Newton & Zimring's chapter on self-defense dismisses women's concerns
about self-defense against rape (or, presumably, other kind of attack) in
one contemptuous sentence to the effect that "women generally are less
capable of self-defense [than men] and less knowledgeable about guns."{118}
Feminist outrage about this derisive comment may account for the fact that
Prof. Zimring's subsequent writings, including the chapter on self-defense
in a 1987 book, prudently eschew any attempt to deal with women's right
to, or capacity for, self-defense with guns.{119}

Other anti-gun treatments do not specifically address rape beyond their
general position that victims should always submit to criminals unless flight
is possible: the best way to "keep you alive [is to] put up no defense
-- give them what they want or run" advises Handgun Control, Inc.{120}
However unacceptable that advice may be to feminists, at least it avoids
the confusion that marks the discussion of gun-armed defense against rape
by the Handgun Control Staff of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. For the first
31 of its 36 pages the HANDGUN CONTROL STAFF pamphlet harps on the prohibitive
dangers of any kind of physical resistance to crime. Throughout, the Handgun
Control Staff's argument against precautionary gun ownership consists in
warning against handguns or any other form of physical resistance -- the
risk of any kind of physical resistance is so high that victims should always
submit to attackers.{121}

But when the Handgun Control Staff finally get to rape, it offers a startling
volte face -- all the more startling because it lacks even an explanation,
much less a justification of its contradicting all that has preceded it.
The Handgun Control Staff just blithely announces that women don't need
handguns to resist rape because of "the effectiveness of other means
of resistance such as verbal and physical resistance".{122} Yet, if
the authors believe their own prior warnings, "physical resistance"
is prohibitively dangerous; e.g. the Pamphlet's twice-repeated point (each
time in italics) that "a victim is more than eight times as likely
to be killed when using a self-protective measure" of any kind;{123}
or its more general admonition (again in italics) that "victims who
resist experience much higher rates of fatality and injury."{124}

The HANDGUN CONTROL STAFF pamphlet also points out that many rapes do not
occur in the victim's home but in other locations where she presumably would
not be legally entitled to carry a gun. But this highlights the fact that
the majority of rapes do occur in the victim's home where she is entitled
to have a gun (in all but the few jurisdictions like Washington, D.C. where
victims are not permitted to have guns for self-defense). In short, the
majority of rapes occur where a woman may legally have a gun and the empirical
evidence is that in 83% of the cases it will protect her from being raped.

Some readers may object that the preceding section of this paper shirks
the crucial issue of victim injury by veering off onto the side-issue of
intellectual honesty. Yes (they may say) the Handgun Control Staff's discussion
of rape is inconsistent to the point of dishonesty; nevertheless, the pamphlet
does marshall impressive data that victims who resist are often seriously
hurt or killed.{125} Does that data not validate Zimring, Hawkins and Handgun
Control, Inc. in teaching that victims ought to submit to rapists, robbers
or other violent criminals: the best way to "keep you alive [is to]
put up no defense -- give them what they want or run."{126}

The short answer is that the data the HANDGUN CONTROL STAFF pamphlet presents
is irrelevant to the risk of injury to victims who resist with a handgun.
This pre-1980s data does not deal with guns specifically. It gives only
a conglomerate figure for the percentage of victims injured or killed when
resisting physically in any way whatever. This conglomerate figure includes
some few victims who resisted with a gun, many more who used knivee, clubs
or some makeshift weapon, and many who resisted totally unarmed. It is crucial
to distinguish resistance with a gun from all other kinds of resistance,
because a gun differs qualitatively from all other weapons in its defensive
value. Criminals generally select victims who are weaker than themselves.
Only a gun gives weaker, older, less aggressive victims equal or better
chances against a stronger attacker; as even Zimring and Hawkins state,
guns empower "persons [who are] physically or psychologically unable
to overpower [another] through violent physical contact."{127}

The difference is evident in post-1978 National Crime Survey data which
do allow us to distinguish victim injury in cases of gun-armed resistance
from victim injury where resistance was with lesser weapons, and from cases
of non-resistance. Ironically, the results validate the anti-gun critics'
danger-of-injury concerns as to every form of resistance except with a gun.
The gun-armed resister was actually much less likely to be injured than
the non- resister, who was, in turn, much less likely to be injured than
those who resisted without a gun. Only 12-17% of the gun armed resisters
were injured. Those who submitted to the felons' demands were twice as likely
to be injured (gratuitously); those resisting without guns were three times
as likely to be injured as those with guns.{128}

(It bears emphasis that these results do NOT mean that a gun allows victims
to resist, regardless of circumstances. In many cases submission will be
the wiser course Indeed, what the victim survey data suggests differs startlingly
from both pro- and anti-gun stereotypes: keeping a gun for defense may induce
sober consideration of the dangers of reckless resistance; their low injury
rate may show that gun owners are not only better able to resist, but to
evaluate when to submit, than are non-owners who, having never seriously
contemplated those choices, must suddenly decide between them.)

8. The "submission position" in white, male academia

By the "submission position", of course, I mean the view embraced
by various anti-gun scholars that victims should submit to felons rather
than offering forcible resistance of any kind; if an attacker cannot be
"talked out" of his crime, the victim should comply in order to
avoid injury.{129} Not insignificantly, the academic proponents of the submission
position are all white males.{130}

This is significant insofar as the submission position is conditioned by
the relative immunity to crime its proponents enjoy due to their racial,
sexual and economic circumstances. In general, the submission position literature
does not eve mention rape. Equally significant, it treats robbery as the
once-in-a-lifetime danger it is for a salaried white academic. His risk
of meeting a robber is so low that he is unlikely to keep a gun ready for
that eventuality. Moreover, submitting once in his life to the loss of the
money in his wallet may well be "the better part of valor" for
the kind of victim who can replace that money by a trip to his ATM and can
minimize the loss by taking it off his taxes. A very different calculus
of costs and benefits of resisting may apply to

an elderly Chicano whom the San Francisco Examiner reports has
held onto his grocery by outshooting fifteen armed robbers [while] nearby
stores have closed because thugs have either bankrupted them or have
casually executed their unresisting proprietors... [Or] welfare recipients
whom robbers target, knowing when their checks come and where they cash
them [or] the elderly trapped in deteriorating neighborhoods (like the
Manhattan couple who in 1976 hanged themselves in despair over repeatedly
losing their pension checks and furnishings to robbers).{131}

Regrettably, for many victims crime is not the isolated happenstance
it is for white male academics.{132} Let us hypothesize a Black shopkeeper;
perhaps a retired Marine master sergeant who has invested the life savings
from "20-years-and out" in the only store he can afford. Not coincidentally,
it is located in an area where robbery insurance is prohibitively high or
unobtainable at any price. In deciding whether to submit to robbery or resist,
he and others who live or work in such areas must weigh a factor which finds
no place in the submission position literature: that to survive they may
have to establish a reputation for not being easily victimized.{133} The
submission position literature is equally oblivious to the special factors
that may have importance for rape victims; even one rape -- much less several
-- may cause catastrophic psychological injury that may be worsened by submission,
mitigated by even unsuccessful resistance.{134}

By no means am I arguing that resistance with guns (or without) is optimum
for crime victims in any or all situations. I am only noting additional
factors that really ought to be considered by well-salaried white, male
intellectuals presume (as I certainly would not) to tell the kind of people
who are most often crime victims what is best for them. It is presumptuous
for scholars, however learned, to pontificate as to what course is best
for an individual victim whose values and situation they may not share.
Consider the reflections of a woman who (without a gun) successfully resisted
rape:

I believed he would kill me if I resisted. But the other part
was that I would try to kill him first because I guess that for me, at that
time in my life, it would have been better to have died resisting rape than
to have been raped.

I decided I wasn't going to die. It seemed a waste to die on the floor
of my apartment so I decided to fight.{135}

COMPARISONS BETWEEN NATIONS AND OVER TIME

Anti-gun crusaders are addicted to the making of foreign comparisons which
constitute probably the single most pernicious source of misinformation
and misunderstanding of gun regulation issues. This misinformation and misunderstanding
(which are also involved in comparisons made across time) result from a
grotesque mix of statistical misrepresentation with partisan selection and
presentation, and sheer historical ignorance.

Such comparisons are used to argue that gun ownership causes crime -- a
causation that supposedly results in the U.S. having more homicide per capita
(i.e., a higher rate of murder) than do selected other countries which virtually
prohibit gun ownership. In fact, the determinants of the relative amounts
of violence in nations are socio-cultural and institutional. The effects
of such basic determinants cannot be offset by any gun control strategy,
no matter how well-crafted and rigorous. Reducing availability of any other
particular kind of weapon, including guns, in general cannot radically decrease
crime because the number of guns that are illegally available will always
suffice for those who are determined to obtain and misuse them.

Two examples of socio-cultural differences that result in widely different
murder rates come immediately to mind. The first is the unknown (to Americans)
fact that each year hundreds of men in Japan murder their families and then
kill themselves. This is so much a tradition of Japanese culture that it
was not even a crime until fairly recently. Japanese murder rates remain
admirably low because they exclude these "family suicides".{136}

Second, compare America's high murder rate to Europe's far higher suicide
rates: sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset has suggested that cultural factors
cause disturbed Americans to strike out against others whereas disturbed
Europeans tend to turn their violence on themselves. This helps explain
the details of American and European statistics set out in the International
Intentional Homicide Table, below.

In contrast, blaming gun ownership explains nothing because that interpretation
is flatly inconsistent with the international statistical evidence. If gun
ownership were a major "cause" of crime and gun availability a
major factor in the amount of criminal homicide: a) nations where gun availability
is as or more widespread than in the U.S. would uniformly have appreciably
higher murder rates than the norm for demographically comparable nations;{137};
and b) nations which ban or severely restrict gun ownership would have appreciably
lower homicide rates than the U.S. at least. Yet, as the International Intentional
Homicide Table set out below shows, the homicide rates in nations where
gun availability exceeds the U.S. (e.g., Israel, New Zealand and Switzerland{138})
are as low as those of the highly gun-restrictive Western European and British
Commonwealth countries to which America is frequently adversely compared.
Moreover, the two nations which very severely restrict gun ownership (and
punish violation with death), Taiwan and South Africa, both have far higher
apolitical murder rates than the U.S.

2. Historical ignorance and the anti-gun crusade

Likewise, the historical evidence refutes the attribution of differential
international violence rates to differences in gun laws rather than socio-institutional
and cultural differences. Those who attribute low European violence rates
to banning guns are apparently unaware that those low rates long preceded
the gun bans.{139} In fact, stringent gun laws first appeared in the U.S.,
not Europe -- despite which high American crime rates persisted and grew.{140}
Ever-growing violence in various American states from the 1810s on, led
them to pioneer ever more severe gun controls.{141} But in Europe, where
violence was falling, or was not even deemed an important problem, gun controls
varied from the lax to the non- existent. During the 19th Century in England,
for instance, crime fell from its high in the late 18th Century to its idyllic
early 20th Century low -- yet the only gun control was that police could
not carry guns.{142}

In considering reasons for the differentials between U.S. and British homicide
historically, Prof. Monckkonen rejects the conventional explanations includiung
gun ownership, remarking:

Virtually every analysis put forward to explain the
[comparatively] very high United States homicide rate has been
ahistorical.... Had they been proposed as historical, they would have
foundered quickly for the explanatory inadequacy of these "pet" theories
becomes immediately apparent in a historical context.{143}

When most European countries finally began enacting gun laws in the post-WWI
period, the motivation was not crime (with which those countries had been
little afflicted) but terrorism and the political violence from which they
have continued to suffer to the present day far more than the U.S. ever
has.{144} This difference is reflected in a practice that helps to keep
official English murder rates so admirably low: English statistics do not
include "political" murders, e.g. those by the IRA, whereas the
American statistics include every kind of murder and manslaughter.) The
different purposes of European versus American laws is evidenced by their
diametrically opposite patterns: many of the "Saturday Night Special"
laws American states enacted to deal with 19th Century crime banned all
but standard military- issue revolvers, i.e. the very expensive large, heavy
Colt. In stark contrast, such military caliber arms were the first guns
banned in post-WWI Europe, the purpose being to disarm restive former soldiers
and the para- military groups they formed.{145}

Moreover, if greater American gun relative availability were the cause of
international crime differences, the difference in crime would only be as
to crimes with guns. Yet American rates for robbery, rape and other violent
crimes committed without guns are enormously higher than the rates for such
crimes (with and without guns, combined) which are uniformly low among Western
European, British Commonwealth etc. countries regardless of whether they
allow or ban gun ownership. England's leading gun control analyst sardonically
disposes of the issues with two rhetorical questions: 1) How do those who
blame "lax American gun laws" for the far higher U.S. rate of
gun crime explain its also having far more knife crime: do they think that
Englishmen have to get a permit to own a butcher knife?; and 2) How do those
who attribute U.S. gun murders to greater gun availability explain the far
higher U.S. rate of stranglings and of victims being kicked to death: do
they think that Americans "have more hands and feet than" Britons?
Flatly asserting that, no matter how stringent the gun laws, there will
always be enough guns in any society to arm those desiring to obtain and
use them illegally, he attributes grossly higher American violence rates
"not to the availability of any particular class of weapon" but
to socio-cultural and institutional factors which dictate

that American criminals are more willing to use extreme
violence[; quoting a report of the British Office of Health Economics:]
"One reason often given for the high numbers of murders and manslaughters
in the United States is the easy availability of firearms.... But the
strong correlation with racial and linked socio-economic variables suggests
that the underlying determinants of the homicide rate relate to particular
cultural factors."{146}

3. If increasing gun ownership caused American murder rates to rise
in the 1960s, did it also cause them to stabilize in the 1970s and fall
in the 1980s?

The theory that widespread gun ownership causes murder seemed plausible
to Americans in the 1960s when ever-increasing gun sales went hand-in-hand
with (actually, were a reaction to) ever- increasing crime rates. But this
interpretation is exploded when the time frame is expanded to include statistics
from the 1970s and 1980s. In those decades, handgun ownership continued
to rise by c. 2 million per year, so that the American handgun-stock increased
from 24-29 million in 1968 to 65-70 million in 1988. Yet homicide actually
fell somewhat and handgun (and other gun) homicides decreased markedly.{147}
The point is even more striking in comparison to the English homicide rate:
in 1974 the American rate was 40 times the English; 15 years (and 30 million
more American handguns) later, the American rate was only ten times greater.{148}
Since this trend occurred in decades in which English gun law severity increased,
both administratively and by added legislative rstrictions, it cannot be
explained by attributing murder to widespread gun availability.

The attribution is further undermined if violent crimes are differentiated
by type. Anti-gun academic crusaders do not claim that buying a handgun
suddenly turns otherwise law abiding people to rape, robbery and burglary.
Yet it was such crimes (and murder in the course of them) that grew spectacularly
from the mid-1960s on. In contrast, there was no increase in the domestic
homicides the sages theorize guns cause. (Indeed, the c. 100% increase in
handguns in the era 1968-79 was followed by a 26.6% decrease in domestic
homicide from 1984 on -- despite the addition of another c. 2,000,000 handguns
in 1980 and each succeeding year.{149})

4. Concealing the declining American murder trend by combining suicide
and murder statistics

Anti-gun sages have seized on a new device in order not to have to deal
with these embarrassing facts. They conceal the fact of declining American
homicide (particularly gun homicide) by adding in suicide figures, producing
a combined "Intentional Homicide" rate which they then claim to
be "caused" by widespread gun ownership.{150} Yet these same anti-gun
academics continue to compare the American murder rate (alone) to the murder
rates of specially selected foreign countries -- without mentioning that
virtually every country they select to compare has enormously higher suicide
rate than the U.S. For instance, Prof. Baker, the originator of the combined
homicide-suicide approach, compares American and Danish murder rates, placing
great emphasis on the fact that the American rate is higher by about 7 per
100,000 population. Yet Baker somehow forgets to mention that making the
same comparison as to suicide rate would show the Danish rate to be much
higher yet than the American: higher by 16.5 deaths per hundred thousand.
Nor, of course, does Baker mention that when suicide and murder figures
are combined according to the Baker method, the Danish death rate per 100,000
population is almost 50% higher than the American.{151}

Despite their reliance on international murder comparisons, none of the
anti-gun academics who apply the combined murder- suicide figure approach
(in describing American figures) follow the combined figure approach when
making those international comparisons. Could that have anything to do with
the following facts which emerge from the International Intentional Homicide
Table (below): that of 18 nations for which figures were available, the
U.S. ranks only 11th in intentional homicide; that its combined homicide/suicide
rate is less than half of the suicide rate alone in gun-banning Hungary
and less than 1/3 the suicide rate alone of gun-banning Rumania; that New
Zealand ranks 16th despite a rate of gun ownership that far exceeds the
U.S.'; and that the lowest rate on the Table is for Israel, a country that
actually encourages and requires almost universal gun ownership.

INTERNATIONAL INTENTIONAL HOMICIDE TABLE

Table is based on figures from two different sources (as further specified
below): insofar as they are given therein, all figures are from the 1983-6
averages in Killias' Tables 1 & 2;{152} insofar as Killias does not
give figures they are from the latest year listed for the country in U.N.
DEMOGRAPHIC YEARBOOK-1985 (published, 1987). Figures from Killias are in
bold face; all other figures are in ordinary type.

The evidence from international comparisons is confirmed by the various
neutral attempts to determine whether gun ownership causes violence footnoted
earlier and by the most extensive and methodologically sophisticated study,
Kleck's application of modern, computer-assisted statistical techniques
to post-World War II American crime rate data. The interactive cause and
effect result he found contradicts that posited by anti-gun crusaders. Kleck
concludes that from the 1960s on fear engendered by violent crime sparked
enormously increased gun ownership among the general populace. This increased
gun ownership did not itself increase crime of any kind (if anything, it
dampened it); but an increase in gun ownership, or at least in gun use,
by criminals helped cause the post-1960 increases violent crime, including
murder.{153}

It may be of interest that Kleck simultaneously investigated the possible
effect of the cessation of capital punishment of the 1960s and '70s in causing
the crime wave. He concludes that the increased violence was also not attributable
to the cessation of capital punishment caused. Note also that this criminological
evidence does not support the gun lobby's myopic opposition to gun controls.
On the contrary, Kleck endorses sweeping, strongly enforced laws against
possession of any kind of firearm by persons convicted of any kind of felony.{154}

Guns are more lethal than some other means of death, though less lethal
than others such as hanging, certain poisons and falls from great heights.
Because of their lethality guns may facilitate murder or suicide among those
inclined to them anyway. On the other hand, they are also incomparably the
most effective means by which a victim may resist violent attack.

MASSACRES

July, 1984

an unemployed and apparently deranged security guard
with a shotgun killed 21 customers and employees at a San Ysidro,
California MacDonalds Hamburger outlet.

August, 1986

a National Guard marksmanship instructor who had been
discharged from his job as a postal worker killed 15 former co- workers in
an Oklahoma Post Office.

February, 1988

a disgruntled employee in Sunnyvale, Ca. killed 7
and wounded four fellow employees with a shotgun.

January, 1989

a petty criminal and former mental patient with an
assault rifle killed 5 children and wounded 30 other people in a Stockton,
Ca. schoolyard.

Setpember, 1989

a suicidal manic-depressive with an assault rifle
killed 8 and wounded 12 in a Louisville, Ky. industrial plant.

In each of these incidents the perpetrator committed suicide or remained
on the scene to be killed, eschewing any opportunity to escape before the
police arrived.

It is deceptive for gun prohibition-confiscation advocates to use the pathos
and horror induced by such tragedies -- and by assassinations -- to argue
their case.{155} In more candid moments they concede that it is impossibile
to take guns away from those who are determined to misuse them: "No
amount of control will stop a determined assassin -- or a determined street
robber -- from getting a gun."{156} The theory of gun prohibition is
bottomed on an entirely different claim. That claim (which is examined in
the next section of this paper) is that guns cause acquaintance or domestic
homicides committed, supposedly, by the ordinary law-abiding citizenry who
would never have killed if they had not had access to a gun in a moment
of wild anger.{157}

In sum, no confiscation effort, however broad or stringent will disarm hardened
criminals, much less political terrorists or killers so highly motivated
for personal reasons as to undertake massacres that are substantially likely
to result in their own deaths. On the contrary, if massacre were a serious
threat to life in the U.S., probably the best policy response would be that
of Israel which depends upon the defensive value of widespread precautionary
gun possession among vast sectors of the populace. Consider an incident
in a Jerusalem cafe just four months prior to the California MacDonalds
massacre: three terrorists who tried to machine-gun the crowd were able
to kill only 1 victim before being shot down by handgun-armed Israelis.
When presented to the press the next day, the surviving terrorist bitterly
explained that his group had not realized that Israeli civilians were armed.
The terrorists had planned to machine-gun a succession of crowd spots, believing
that they would be able to escape before the police or army could arrive
to deal with them.{158}

In sum, anti-gun policies not only offer no solution for the massacre situation,
but are detrimental in precluding whatever chance the victims might have
to protect themselves in the crucial time before the police can arrive on
the scene.{159} Please note that I am not necessarily suggesting this as
a model for American policy. Because terrorism is Israel's most pressing
criminal justice problem, Israel maximizes the presence of armed citizens
by firearms training and encouraging gun ownership and carrying by almost
the entire populace (Jews of both sexes and for the Druse and other pro-Israeli
Arabs). The advisability of such measures is quite different for the U.S.
where military training is not universal even for males.

Arguably the issue does not even merit examination since massacres represent
a very small part of the American homicide problem. Melodramatic as they
were, if the death total for all the massacres I have listed is combined,
it still constitutes less than 1% of the American murder total in any single
year. But there is a tangential significance to the manner in which anti-gun
advocates have exploited the massacre issue for which they (in calmer moments)
admit their proposals have no value. By capitalizing on the emotions these
tragedies arouse, anti-gun advocates display a cynical unscrupulousness
that is wildly at variance with their pretensions of moral superiority over
the gun lobby. Indeed, this may help explain the agreement of members of
Congress in a recent poll that the two lobby groups which provide them the
most consistently reliable information are the American Library Association
and the National Rifle Association.

THE LAW ABIDING GUN OWNER AS ACQUAINTANCE & DOMESTIC MURDERER

Conceding that banning handguns would not disarm terrorists, assassins etc.,
the anti-gun argument portrays them as exceptions to the generality, which
is "previously law abiding citizens committing impulsive gun-murders
while engaged in arguments with family members or acquaintances."{160}
The anti-gun crusaders deem most murder to result from gun ownership among
such ordinary citizens: "That gun in the closet to protect against
burglars will most likely be used to shoot a spouse in a moment of rage....The
problem is you and me -- law-abiding folks."{161}

If this portrayal of murderers were true, a gun ban might drastically reduce
murder because the primary perpetrators (the law abiding) might give up
guns even though hardened criminals, terrorists and assassins would not.
Unfortunately for this appealingly simple nostrum, every national and local
study of homicide reveals that murderers are not at all ordinary citizens
-- nor are they people who are likely to comply with gun laws. Murderers
(and fatal gun accident perpetrators) are atypical, highly aberrant individuals
whose spectacular indifference to human life, including their own, is evidenced
by life histories of substance abuse, automobile accident, felony and attacks
on relatives and acquaintances.{162}

1. The prior felony record of murderers

The F.B.I.'s annual crime reports do not regularly compile data on the prior
criminal records of murderers and no such data are otherwise available on
a national basis. But in a special data run for the Eisenhower Commission,
the FBI found that 74.7% of murder arrestees nationally over a four year
period had had prior arrest(s) for violent felony or burglary.{163} In another
one year period 77.9% of murder arrestees had priors.{164} Over yet another
five year period, nationally: arrested murderers had adult criminal records
showing an average prior criminal career of at least six years duration
including four major felony arrests; 57.1% of these murder arrestees had
been convicted of at least one of these prior adult felonies; and 64% of
a national sample of convicted murderers who had been released were rearrested
within four years.{165}

These data are confirmed by numerous local studies over the past 40 years.{166}
For instance, a Washington, D.C. profile showed that a typical murderer
there had six prior arrests, two for felonies, one violent.{167} Note that
these data do not even begin to comprise the full extent of murderers' prior
criminal careers -- and thus how different murderers are from the ordinary
law-abiding person. Much serious crime goes unreported. Of those crimes
that are reported a large number are never cleared by arrest; and of those
so cleared many are juvenile arrests that are not counted in the data recounted
above. At the same time we know that most juvenile, unsolved or unreported
serious crimes are concentrated in the relatively small part of our population
who have been arrested for other crimes.{168}

2. The prior violence history of wife murderers

Intrafamily murderers are especially likely to have engaged in far more
previous violent crime than show up in their arrest records. But because
these were attacks on spouses and/or other family members, they will rarely
have resulted in an arrest.{169} So domestic murderers' official records
tend not to show their full prior violence, but only their adult arrests
for attacking people outside their families. Therefore only about "seventy
to seventy- five percent of domestic homicide offenders have been previously
arrested and about half previously convicted."{170} As to how many
crimes they perpetrate within the family, even in a relatively short space
of time, "review of police records in Detroit and Kansas City"
shows that in

90% of the cases of domestic homicide, police had responded at
least once to a disturbance call at the home during the two year period
prior to the fatal incident, and in over half (54%) of the cases, they had
been called five or more times.{171}

A leading authority on domestic homicide notes: "The day-to- day
reality is that most family murders are preceded by a long history of assaults...."
Studies (including those just cited) "indicate that intrafamily homicide
is typically just one episode in a long standing syndrome of violence."{172}
Nor is "acquaintance homicide" accurately conceptualized as a
phenomenon of previously law-abiding people killing each other in neighborhood
arguments. The term "acquaintance homicide" covers, and far more
typically it is exemplified by, e.g. a drug addict killing his dealer in
the course of robbing him; a loan shark or bookie killing a non-paying customer;
gang members, drug dealers, and members of organized crime "families"
killing each other.{173}

3. Non sequitur and fabrication as a basis for claiming that murderers
are ordinary citizens rather than violent aberrants

In contrast to these evaluations, neither of the data sets cited as supporting
claims that murderers "are good citizens who kill each other"
is persuasive. The National Coalition to Ban Handgun's assertion "Most
murders are committed by a relative or close acquaintance of the victim"{174}
is conceptually unpersuasive because it is a non sequitur: it simply does
not follow from the fact that a murderer knows or is related to his victims
that he must be an ordinary citizen rather than a long time criminal. That
would only follow if ordinary citizens differ from criminals in that criminals
neither know anyone nor are related to anyone.

The other data set supposedly showing murderers are ordinary citizens is
Lindsay's assertion that "most murderers (73% in 1972) are committed
by previously law abiding citizens committing impulsive gun-murders while
engaged in arguments with family members or acquaintances."{175} While
there is nothing conceptually wrong with this it is empirically unpersuasive
because it is simply a fabrication. Lindsay cites it to the FBI 1972 UNIFORM
CRIME REPORT. But that REPORT offers no such statistic; rather it and other
FBI data diametrically contradict it. Far from showing that 73% of murderers
nationally were "previously law abiding citizens", they show that
74.7% of persons arrested for murder had prior arrest(s) for a violent felony
or burglary.{176}

As the Abstract to the NIJ Evaluation concludes: It is
commonly hypothesized that much criminal violence, especially homicide,
occurs simply because the means of lethal violence (firearms) are readily
at hand, and thus, that much homicide would not ocrur were firearms
generally less available. There is no persuasive evidence that supports
this view.{177}

I emphasize that this does NOT refute the case for gun control, including
rationally tailored gun bans. The fact that murderers are "real criminals"
with life histories of violence, felony, substance abuse and auto accident
highlights the danger in such people having handguns -- or guns of any kind!{178}
But it is very misleading when homicide statistics idiosyncratic to gun
misusers are presented as arguing for banning guns to the whole populace.
Idiosyncratic statistics from such idiosyncratic people provide no basis
for the claim that precautionary gun ownership by average citizens seriously
endangers their friends or relatives.

GUN ACCIDENTS

1. Fatalities among children.

To emphasize accidental handgun fatalities among children, Handgun Control,
Inc. runs nationally an advertisement which pictures an infant playing with
a pistol. An academic-produced video for schools and libraries solemnly
asserts that "a child is accidentally killed by a handgun every day"
(i.e., 365 per year).{179} Two academic anti-gun crusaders put the accidental
death toll at "almost 1,000 children" per year.{180}

Fortunately these assertions are grotesque exaggerations. In fact, the National
Safety Council figures of identifiable handgun accidental fatality average
only 246 people of all ages per year.{181} For children alone, the identifiable
handgun average was: 10-15 accidental fatalities per year for children under
age five; and 50-55 yearly for children under age fifteen.{182}

Obviously it is a terrible tragedy when a child dies in a an accident, whether
with a handgun or otherwise. But that does not justify falsifying statistics
in order to concoct an argument for banning handguns. As discussed in the
next section of this paper, fatal gun accidents (including those involving
children) are largely attributable to gun possession among the same kinds
of irresponsible aberrant adults who are responsible for murders. Some feasible
controls proposals for reducing child (and other) accidental firearms deaths
are offered in the penultimate section of this paper. As to the advisability
of going beyond controls to banning handguns, the 13 children under 5 who
died in handgun accidents may be compared to the 381 such children who in
1980 drowned in swimming pools. Yet nobody would demand even a ban on new
swimming pools -- much less that all those who currently own pools be required
to fill them in.

Anti-gun fanatics are wont to exclaim that even if a gun ban saves only
one life it is worth it. That has special appeal if the lives being saved
are those of very young children. But if they feel prohibiting/confiscating
upwards of 70 million handguns is justifed to save 13 young children's lives
(and confiscating upwards of 200 million guns of all types to save 34 children),
why does saving 381 annually not justify banning swimming pools, or at least
prohibiting their proliferation? Is it possible that anti-gun fanatics are
motivated more by hatred of guns and their owners than by saving lives?
Of course, handguns and swimming pools are very different things that may
merit very different policy responses. Among the relevant differences are
that, unlike handguns, pools are not used to defend against c. 645,000 crimes
each year and do not save thousands of innocent lives.

The disparity is even more striking in regard to fatalities caused by cigarettes.
Compare the 10-15 children under age five who die in handgun accidents annually
to the 432 who die in residential fires caused by adults who doze off while
smoking.{183} Not only do we not not forbid smoking in the home, the federal
government actually pays tobacco farmers subsidies to grow their crops.
Yet cigarettes, which have absolutely no social utility (except perhaps
for the subjective pleasure they give smokers), take hundreds of times more
lives than do handguns in accident, murder and suicide combined. In that
connection, it may be noted that we also do not ban alcoholic beverages,
though people under their influence commit more murders and suicides than
occur with handguns -- and hundreds of times more fatal accidents and non-fatal
violent crimes.{184} (If it be suggested that we repealed Prohibition only
because it proved unenforceable, the short answer is that a handgun ban
is less enforceable yet.{185})

2. The Aberrance of Gun Accident Perpetrators.

My reason for limiting the preceding discussion primarily to children is
that the issues that arise with adults who perpetrate serious accidents
are much the same as with murderers. This kind of person is just as atypical
as the murderer; indeed, he closely resembles the murderer in attitudes
and life history of singular irresponsibility and indifference to human
life and welfare.{186} This similarity is marked in fatal gun accident perpetrators:
as compared to cars (which take 190 times as many lives{187}), handguns
are simple mechanisms that are entirely safe for any owner who is responsible
enough to observe elementary precautions. Empirical studies show that "A
gun becomes involved in a fatal accident through misuse." -- for, unlike
the average gun owner, those "who cause such accidents are disproportionately
involved in other accidents, violent crime and heavy drinking."{188}
Given their background of serious felony, substance abuse, automobile and
other dangerous accidents, often irrational assaults on family, etc. the
question as to these reckless and/or irresponsible people is not whether
they will kill themselves or others, but when they will eventually do so.{189}
Indeed, a very large portion of child gun accidents may be attributable
to these people who are likely to irresponsibly leave loaded guns unsecured.

It is a category error to apply to the general citizenry gun accident fatality
statistics that are actually accurate only for idiosyncratic gun misusers.{190}
But, once again, this highlights the imperative for gun controls to forbid
such misusers having access not only to the relatively accident-free handgun
but to any kind of firearm. Feasible gun control proposals to deal with
the problem of accidental fatalities are offered below.

THE NEED TO CONTROL ALL GUNS, NOT JUST HANDGUNS

Now I wish to address a crucial problem that is invariably ignored by both
pro- and anti-gun extremists alike: controls over handguns but not rifles
and shotguns, may result in the counter- productive substitution of these
weapons accident and assault situations where long weapons are far more
problematic. The gun lobby has understandably not made this point despite
its being the single strongest argument against the National Coalition to
Ban Handguns. Naturally, the National RIFLE Association has no interest
in explaining that long guns are much more deadly and easy to discharge
accidentally because that only defuses demands for banning handguns at the
cost of justifying greater regulation for all guns.

Anti-gun advocates and academics have failed to address long gun substitution
because they are mostly too ignorant -- proudly ignorant -- of guns to even
grasp the problem.{191} They are proud to be ignorant because it validates
their moral superiority over the barbaric gun lovers they so despise. But,
whatever the moral value of their ignorance, it precludes their anti-gun
proposals being taken seriously. Indeed, it renders their proposals not
just useless but actually life-threatening because they might lead to the
substitution of long guns for handguns in accident and assault situations.

1. Handguns vs. long guns as accident vectors

Anti-handgun advocates recognize that an effective handgun ban would induce
many people to substitute long guns for the purposes handguns now serve.
In a 1979 article National Coalition to Ban Handguns (NCBH) chief spokesman,
Samuel Fields Jr., argued a ban would greatly reduce the "2500 handgun
deaths" he asserted were annually "associated with handgun accidents"
in that

A strict permit system and/or a ban on private possession of
handguns would significantly alter the firearms habits of law-abiding
citizens, who would then turn to safer long guns for self-protection.
[Emphasis added.]{192}

Academic proponents of these views include Dr. Diane H. Schetky in two
different issues of the AMERICAN JOURNAL OF DISEASES OF CHILDREN.{193} Asserting
that she wants handguns banned, not the "taking away all firearms",
she follows Fields in alleging as examples of the terrible cost of handgun
ownership that "Handguns account for only 20% of the nation's firearms
yet account for 90% of all firearms use, both criminal and accidental."{194}

What is remarkable about such assertions is not just that their every single
assertion is wrong, but that their implicit (and in Fields' case explicit)
recommendation that long guns are "safer" defensive weapons than
handguns is tragically contrary to the truth. The fact is that, for a host
of technical reasons, long guns are both far more susceptible to accidental
discharge than handguns and far more deadly when so discharged; and that
is particularly true for small children; toddlers cannot operate a handgun,
but can easily discharge a long gun their irresponsible parents keep loaded
and readily availably to them in the home.{195}

The crucial safety difference between handgun and long gun clearly appears
from an accurate statement of the accidental gun death statistics which
Mr. Fields and Dr. Shetky have so garbled (to put the matter most charitably):
Fields' claim of 2500 fatal handgun accidents annually exaggerates by a
factor of more than ten the number of such fatalities that can be identified
by the National Safety Council (246 annually); indeed, Fields claim of 2,500
accidental deaths grossly overstates the average yearly total for handguns
and long guns combined (c. 1,850). As to the handgun, its comparative safety
advantage is demonstrated by the fact that although it represents 90% or
more of the guns kept loaded at any one time, it can be identified as the
weapon in less than 13.5% of the fatal gun accidents.{196}

Fields may be forgiven his failure to offer such comparisons (but not his
misrepresenting the gun accident statistics as being to the contrary), since
when he wrote there were no national data breaking down fatal gun accidents
into handgun vs. long gun. But such data had become available well before
1986 when Shetky wrote. Regrettably she chose instead to cite something
she calls "Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports,
Annual Crime Surveys, 1963-73" (emphasis in original) as the source
for her dual claim that handguns: a) make up only 20% of the American gunstock,
but b) cause 90% of the fatal gun accidents. It is not surprising that a)
is 100% low and b) is 660% high;{197} after all, not only does her alleged
source not give those figures, the FBI does not provide data on those subjects
at all!{198}

2. Handguns vs. long guns as criminal homicide vectors

Academic anti-gun crusaders have pointed out that, since gun wounds in general
are much deadlier than knife wounds, banning all guns would reduce murder
because homicidal attackers would be forced to substitute the less-deadly
knife for guns.{199} True enough, if it be assumed that banning all guns
were feasible politically (which it concededly is not) and that a ban would
disarm the kind of persons who use them feloniously (an issue the anti-gun
sagecraft literature has sedulously avoided treating).

But the same reasoning shows that banning handguns only is likely to actually
and grievously increase the death toll from homicidal attack. Handguns are
deadlier than large knives (which kill only about 2.4% of those they wound);
but rifles are between 5 and 11.4 times deadlier yet, i.e. c. 15 times deadlier
than knives.{200} Shotguns are so much deadlier yet that for medical purposes
the wounds they make are not to be "compared with other bullet wounds...
[A]t close range they are as deadly as a cannon."{201}

Of course, unless sawed off, rifles and shotguns are less concealable than
are handguns. So it would not be reasonable to assume that, if handguns
disappeared, long guns would be used in 100% of the homicidal assaults now
carried out with handguns. Some homicidal attackers would substitute knives
instead, with presumably less lethal results. But, based on medical studies
and gross ballistic comparisons, I have estimated that if long guns were
substituted in only 50% of the assaults now carried out with handguns the
number actually killed would double. Note that that catastrophic result
would occur even if not one victim died in the other 50% of the cases in
which (hypothetically) knives would be substituted!{202}

It cannot seriously be doubted that long guns (either sawed off or unaltered)
could be substituted in 50% of the assault that now involve handguns. Criminological
studies show "that anywhere from 54% to about 80% of homicides occur
in circumstances that would easily permit the use of a long gun".{203}
This is more than confirmed by the felons in the NIJ (National Institute
of Justice) felon survey: 82% of them concurred that "If a criminal
wants a handgun but can't get one he can always saw off a long gun.";
and 87% of the felons who had often used handguns in crime felt that sawing
a long gun off to make it concealable for carrying would be "easy"
-- a view concurred in by 89% of those who had often used shotguns.{204}

Based on these responses, Lizotte calculates that, far from saving lives,
the current handgun death toll might more than triple if a handgun ban led
to long gun substitution at the rates indicated!{205} Perhaps the foregoing
calculations are somehow fundamentally wrong. But no such error has been
exposed by anti-gun academic crusaders. The sagecraft literature deals with
the possibility of long guns being substituted if handguns were banned by
just not mentioning it.

It bears emphasis that the danger of such substitution does not at all preclude
the possibility of intelligently tailored gun controls. It simply dictates
that controls be limited to ones that are politically viable to impose on
long guns and handguns equally -- a possibility which, for obvious reasons,
is never mentioned by the National Rifle Association. But it is even more
irresponsible (and intellectually dishonest to boot) for anti-gun sages
to solemnly proclaim that banning handguns would save lives without ever
addressing the danger that it would result in far more lives being lost.
As the NIJ Evaluation facetiously remarks:

If someone intends to open fire on the authors of this study,
our strong preference is that they open fire with a handgun, and the
junkier the handgun, the better. The possibility that even a fraction of
the predators who now walk the streets armed with handguns would, in the
face of a handgun ban, prowl with sawed-off shotguns instead causes one to
tremble.{206}

BASIC PRINCIPLES OF GUN CONTROL

Realism

The first point under realism is that of the English analyst Greenwood:
no matter how stringent the controls, there will always be enough guns in
any society that anyone determined to have a gun will be able to do so,
whether for crime or self-defense. Thus, after nearly 80 years of ever more
stringently administered state handgun ban, New York City police estimate
the number of illegally owned guns there at 2-3 million. Anti-gun crusaders
attribute this to the fact that handguns are legally obtained in most other
states. But even in peaceful England where very few people think it urgent
to have a gun for self-defense, Greenwood has shown that the number of guns
illegally smuggled in off-sets the number confiscated yearly. In other words,
70 years of ever more strictly administered ban has not even diminished
the illegal gunstock.

Moreover, the more closely one looks, the more absurd it is to blame the
lack of a ban in other states for the failure of New York's handgun ban.
It turns out that the rate at which handguns are (illegally) owned for defense
in New York City is more than double the rate of defensive ownership in
the states where it is legal. The fact is that, if people feel it is urgent
to have a gun for family defense they are going to get one, regardless of
any law. With upwards of 200 million guns in the U.S. (70 million of them
handguns), there is no hope of reducing crime by banning and confiscating
guns. Such a policy would actually reduce the cost of new guns. Any machinist
can manufacture basic revolvers and automatic pistols out of pot metal to
be sold more cheaply than commercially made guns are now -- just as rotgut
sold for less during Prohibition than good liquor had before it. Of course,
pot metal guns would not safely fire more than 100-200 shots. But that would
far more than suffice to meet the demand for new and additional guns for
crime or self-defense purposes.

Gun policies ought not to be designed or adopted according to unrealistic
expectations. The inevitable failure only creates gun lobby propaganda.
The basic determinants of violent crime are fundamental socio-cultural,
institutional and economic factors that no gun law can overcome. So long
as perhaps 1 out of every 300 persons who grow up in the U.S. is inclined
toward violent crime, our society will be far more violent than either gun-banning
England or gun-loving Switzerland, where only 1 out of 30,000 inhabitants
is so inclined.

Favorable Trade-offs

But that does not justify the gun lobby's myopic rejection of all new controls.
Gun controls can have net marginal value if carefully tailored to produce
value that exceeds the costs they involve. For instance, burglars rarely
carry guns. Doubtless the primary reason for this is that burglars expect
to avoid confrontation by striking only when they think the premises are
unoccupied. But their eschewal of gun carrying is reinforced by the knowledge
that in most states they will face much stiffer punishment if they are caught
with a gun in a burglary.

If gun crimes are more to be feared overall, this is a law that does some
good and is virtually cost-free: if burglars obey it, we are all better
off; insofar as they are caught disobeying, the law focusses imprisonment
on those who are most dangerous and, therefore, most desirable to incapacitate.
The same point underlies laws severely punishing ownership of any kind of
gun by people who have been convicted of felony. Of course, the most violent
felons (robbers, rapists, hit men) will be the least likely to obey; but
when they disobey, the law allows them to be incapacitated by long imprisonment
for just owning a gun -- without having to wait until they actually hurt
someone with it.

Parity

It is trite, but necessary, to emphasize that in evaluating gun law strategies
negative as well as positive effects must be considered. The ineluctable
fact is that control strategies that produce long gun substitution for handguns
in any substantial proportion of problematic situations will greatly aggravate
the dangers of gun misuse. Thus any good control strategy involves parity
of regulation between long guns and handguns to avoid the danger of promoting
substitution of the former for the latter. Concomitantly, if controls broad
enough to provide such parity are not now politically feasible, adoption
of the strategy must wait until parity becomes feasible.

Accomodation

Only with strong cooperation from owners can broader federal gun controls
be established. Absent such cooperation, to require a license to own guns,
for instance, would be, at best a dead letter, at worst a source of enforcement
costs that would vastly exceed any possible benefit. Whether cooperation
can be achieved, given the decades of scorn, contempt and hatred that anti-gun
extremists have heaped upon gun owners, is very doubtful.

At a minimum, gun owners would need the reassurance of a U.S. Supreme Court
decision squarely recognizing that the Bill of Rights gives every law abiding,
responsible adult the freedom to choose to own guns for the protection of
home and family. Also, gun owners would have to be convinced: that any proposed
gun law is formulated in recognition of their legitimate interests and represents
an honest attempt to accomodate those interests within the social necessity
of rational control over deadly instruments; and that the law's administration
would not be so hostile and/or arbitrary as to deny law-abiding, responsible
adults the freedom to choose to own guns for home and family defense.

Avoid Unfavorable Trade-Offs

Some anti-gun crusaders have their own, predictably onerous proposal for
avoiding the need for any accomodation. Their plan is for Congress to ban
handguns and command their confiscation by a law imposing a mandatory mimimum
year prison sentence on every violator. Much the same proposal was made
to the New York State Legislature in 1980. It was tabled when the Prison
Commissioner testified that the state prison system would collapse if just
1% of the illegal handgun owners in New York City (where ordinary citizens
cannot get a permit) were caught, tried and imprisoned.

So also would the federal prison system collapse if it tried to house even
100th of 1% of the tens of millions who would not obey a federal handgun
ban. Fortunately, they would not get to prison because the federal court
system would collapse under the burden of trying them.

Affirmative Benefit

Widespread ownership of handguns for defense of self, home or family is
only natural in a nation beset with endemic crime. The empirical evidence
establishes that such victim gun ownership results in the interruption and
frustration of c. 645,000 crimes each year. (Another 280,000 handgun uses
yearly are for defense against poisonous snakes, rabid squirrels, foxes,
etc.) Civilian handgun ownership averts thousands of victim injuries, and
even deaths, which would not otherwise have been avoidable, given the manifest
physical and tactical advantages criminals have over unarmed victims.

Against these palpable benefits there are no substantial costs of gun ownership
by law-abiding, responsible adults. Such ownership may marginally increase
the number of gun accidents. But the vast majority of these stem from gun
misuse by the same aberrant group of reckless and/or violent people who
perpetrate the vast majority of murders. Applying these irresponsible gun
misusers' accident and murder rates to gun possession by the average citizen
makes no more sense that estimating that citizen's chance of dying from
a cut based on death rates among hemophiliacs.

SOME RATIONAL GUN CONTROL PROPOSALS

The following are some ways of fine-tuning current gun laws:

1) Current federal law (and a potpourri of state laws) forbid gun ownership
by convicted felons and persons adjudged of unsound mind. This could be
extended to embrace anyone convicted of driving while intoxicated or of
multiple conviction of selected violent misdemeanors. Such laws should be
leavened by allowing police to give special permits to own a gun to such
people if they have not been in trouble for years.

2) The ban on felons owning guns is undercut because millions of sales are
between private persons where the sellers have no way of checking whether
the buyer is a felon. The obvious way to deal with this would be to require
everyone who owns or wants to buy a gun to acquire a federal permit that
would be available on proof that he/she was an adult without a felony record.
But that is both politically and practically impossible. Gun owners, who
are convinced that the anti-gun crusaders will eventually use permit records
to confiscate all guns, would hysterically fight the law and, if it were
enacted, would flout it en masse. More promising would be to have a criminal
records check done with the driver's license. Every license issued would
bear the notation "eligible to own firearms" (except, of course,
for juveniles, felons and those with sanity records). Sale of a gun to a
person without a driver's license bearing this notation would be a felony
and also make the seller financially liable for any wrong the buyer did
with the gun.

3) Guns commonly enter the underworld when stolen from lawful owners by
burglars who find such theft profitable because guns are easily fencible
items. One way to severely discourage such theft would be a dual law that
(a) imposes a mandatory three year prison sentence on anyone knowingly possessing
a stolen gun; and (b) rebuttably presumes knowing possession if the defendant
is found to have possessed two or more stolen guns. Faced with this, fences
may stop buying stolen guns, thereby discouraging burglars from stealing
them.

4) The potpourri of state laws governing gun ownership by minors should
be strengthened by a uniform provision against possession of any kind of
gun by any person under 18 years of age, except under the supervision of
a parent or other responsible adult.

5) It should be a felony for a parent to negligently allow a gun of any
kind to fall into the hands of an unsupervised minor. Where the parent himself
owns the gun illegally (e.g. because he is a convicted felon), there should
be mandatory imprisonment for at least 5 years. The gun lobby has objected
that a parent whose child has been killed in a gun accident should not be
subjected to the additional penalty of a prison sentence. But people who
are unwilling to obey current gun laws and too irresponsible to protect
childen against the consequences are too dangerous to be allowed at liberty,
independent of any issue of punishment.

6) The current potpourri of state laws on carrying a gun are inconsistent,
irrational and so maladministered that permits to carry are granted to unqualified
persons with special influence and arbitrarily denied to uninfluential persons,
however well qualified.{207} They should be replaced by a comprehensive
prohibition against carrying a loaded gun of any kind (whether concealed
or openly) without a permit which would be issued as a matter of right,
but only to persons demonstrating firearms skill and legal knowledge as
to their use comparable to that required of a police officer in the jurisdiction.

7) In addition, it should be illegal to carry a loaded gun on the person,
if inebriated (a prohibition that would apply even in one's own home), or
while drinking in a bar. .

CONCLUSION: FUTILITY OF LAW REFORM WHEN THE SYSTEM IS AT OVERLOAD

Please do not misconstrue the foregoing law reform proposals to suggest
that fine-tuning gun laws is the key to curbing even gun crime, much less
violence in general. The U.S. already has some 20,000 federal, state and
local gun laws which cover almost every approach to achieving even the inherently
limited benefits gun control offer by way of reducing crime. Though I have
offered suggestions for fine-tuning those laws, the real problem lies not
in the scope or precise provisions of current controls, but in the lack
of consistent enforcement and resources for enforcement. The premier study
of gun law enforcement concludes:

It is very possible that, if gun laws do potentially reduce
gun-related crime, the present laws are all that is needed if they are
enforced. What good would stronger laws do when the court have demonstrated
that they will not enforce them?{208}

Though depressingly accurate as to the lack of enforcement, this actually
understates the problem and is unjust in blaming the courts exclusively.
In areas plagued by violence, prosecutors and courts are at overload with
cases of heinous crime, and many state prisons are literally overflowing
with the perpetrators. A system overburdened with heinous violence cases
is not going to give the proper attention to felons who did nothing more
heinous than carrying a gun. Yet this inability to suitably incarcerate
negates the whole purpose of the gun law which is to help prevent dangerous
crimes before they occur. The lack of resources needed to prosecute and
incapacitate by long incarceration felons who are caught with guns before
they commit heinous crimes, destroys gun controls' potential for preventing
those crimes.

The justice system's near-terminal overload makes irrelevant any merits
which might exist in the gun law proposals offered by both pro- and anti-gun
extremists. For instance, the gun lobby proposes to stop gun crime by highly
publicized mandatory penalty laws: when a crime involves a gun, judges would
be required by the Legislature to impose a minimum 5 year sentence. Gun
crime has fallen in some states that so legislated -- until it became clear
that courts were systematically sabotaging it by imposing the 5 year mandatory
sentence concurrently with, rather than consecutively from, the 5 years
an armed robber would already receive.

It is easy to join Bendis & Balkin in castigating the courts for this.
But it is all too simplistic. Prosecutors are no less at fault for cooperating
with the judges in plea bargains entered into with the understanding that
the sentence would be concurrent rather than consecutive. The blame really
belongs on legislatures for credulously accepting a"quick fix"
approach of burdening an already terminally overburdened system without
adding concomitant resources. Any mandatory sentencing requires massive
infusion of additional resources: for, if a long sentence is certain, and
no plea bargain possible, felons have every reason to add another protracted
jury trial to those already inundating the prosecutor and court. Moroever,
judges and prosecutors know that the result, when prisons are already overflowing,
of mandated sentences for offenders who rob at gunpoint means less time
served by even more dangerous and malignant offenders (for instance, the
rapists who gratuitously mutilated victims with a knife). When reason and
institutional pressures unite against sentencing offenders severely just
because they used a gun, it is unlikely to occur by legislative fiat, absent
vastly expanded prosecutorial, judicial and prison resources.

The problems of terminal systemic overload equally doom the anti-gun program.
As noted earlier, the most specific proposals for banning and confiscating
all guns (or even just handguns) also depends on mandatory sentencing: a
mandatory year term for anyone found with a gun, be he good citizen or felon.
Forget about the felons, either for gun crimes or crimes of any kind. To
seriously enforce this law against the often fanatic owners of 70 million
handguns would far exceed the combind capacity of all the courts in the
U.S. combined, even if they stopped processing all other criminal and civil
cases to try only gun cases.

Less extreme anti-gun proposals are only less unrealistic. Consider the
anti-gun claim that a waiting period, during which their criminal records
were checked, would have prevented John Hinckley from buying the gun with
which he shot President Reagan and Patrick Purdy from buying the gun with
which he massacred the children in Stockton. Regretably, that is simply
false -- though it ought to be true!

During the 1980 campaign, Hinckley, who was then stalking President Carter,
was caught committing the state felony of carrying a concealed handgun and
the federal one of trying to take it on an airliner. Neither charge was
pressed "in the interest of justice"; i.e. the interest of prosecutors
in focussing on their current overload of serious violent crime cases rather
than on people who have not (yet) committed such a crime. The promise of
gun laws is epitomized by the fact that, if he had been convicted and sentenced
under those laws, Hinckley would not have been at liberty to shoot Reagan
a year later. The frustration of that promise by systemic overload is epitomized
by the fact that, even if a waiting period/felony conviction check law existed,
it would not have prevented Hinckley from buying his new gun. He had no
felony conviction record to be checked! The same is true of Purdy: he had
been arrested for a succession of felonies over several years, but all had
been plea bargained down to misdemeanors.

The affirmative social benefit of widespread gun ownership is that handguns
alone are used by good citizens to repel about 645,000 crimes annually.
(Another c. 210,000 defensive handgun uses annually involve dangerous animals,
e.g. rabid skunks. If long guns are included, guns are used to repel about
1 million crimes per year.) The downside of widespread gun availability
among the law- abiding is that there will always be some leakage to criminals
when guns are stolen in burglaries. Realistically, however, we must recognize
that there will always be enough guns in society to supply the needs of
criminals or terrorists.

Moreover we could substantially reduce gun crime by simply enforcing our
present laws. If the resources were committed to convict and incarcerate
every felon caught illegally possessing a gun, many dangerous felons would
be incapacitated and others would learn to eschew guns. But we as a society
are not willing to commit the billions of dollars that would be required.

It is trite and, more important, untrue to characterize the gun crime (and
violent crime in general) as problems to which there are merely "no
easy solutions." These are problems to which there are no good solutions
at all -- only painful compromises. Much of the support for banning guns
comes from people who cannot accept this. But, to paraphrase Bendis &
Balkin, if we are not willing to mobilize the resources necessary to enforce
current gun laws, what is the point of discussing the herculean effort that
would be required to confiscate 200 million guns (or 70 million handguns)
and incarcerate their 98% non-criminal owners?

Samuel Johnson bleakly expressed the matter over 200 years ago:

How small of all that human hearts endure,
The part which laws or kings can cure.

As used herein "the gun lobby" means such organizations as the
National Rifle Association, Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and
Bear Arms, Gun Ownsers of America, etc. that either formally lobby for "gun
rights" or mobilize their members and other gun owners to lobby.

Bruce-Briggs, above.

Tonso above applying concepts based on F. Znaniecki, THE SOCIAL ROLE
OF THE MAN OF KNOWLEDGE, 72-4 (N.Y., Harpers, 1968).

The calculation of family homicides and accidents as costs of
gun ownership is false. The great majority of these killings are among
poor, restless, alcoholic, troubled people, usually with long criminal
records. Applying the domestic homicide rate of these people to the
presumably upstanding citizens whom they prey upon is seriously
misleading.

Policy Lessons at 48-50, Lizotte, "The Costs of Using Gun
Control to Reduce Homicide", 62 BULLETIN N.Y. ACAD. OF MED. 539, 541
(1986).

See discussion in Current Evidence at pp. 200ff and in this paper,
below.

Kleck, "Guns and self defense: Crime Control Through the Use of
Force in the Private Sector" 35 SOCIAL PROBLEMS 1 (1988) (hereinafter
cited as SOCIAL PROBLEMS).

Levinson, "The Embarrassing Second Amendment" 99 YALE LAW
J. 635 (1989). See also: Kates, "Handgun Prohibition and the Original
Meaning of the Second Amendment," 82 MICH. L. REV. 203 (1983),
Shalhope, "The Ideological Origins of the Second Amendment," 69
J. AM. HIS. 599 (1982) and J. Malcolm, "ARMS FOR THEIR DEFENSE":
ORIGINS OF AN ANGLO-AMERICAN RIGHT (forthcoming from Oxford University
Press, 1990).

J. Wright, P. Rossi & K. Daly, UNDER THE GUN: WEAPONS, CRIME AND
VIOLENCE IN THE UNITED STATES (N.Y., Aldine: 1983), see especially pp.
321ff. Unless otherwise stated all references to the NIJ Evaluation are to
this, its final commercially published version, rather than to the
NIJ-published version which is J. Wright, P. Rossi & K. Daly, WEAPONS,
CRIME AND VIOLENCE IN AMERICA: A LITERATURE REVIEW AND RESEARCH AGENDA
(Washington, D.C., Gov't. Print. Off.: 1981).

The other co-author of the Ford Foundation study asserts that
"...gun owners believe (rightly in my view) that the gun controllers
would be willing to sacrifice their interests even if the crime control
benefits were tiny.", Moore, "The Bird in the Hand: A Feasible
Strategy for Gun Control" 2 J. POLICY ANALYSIS & MGMNT. 185, 187-8
(1983) Compare: 93 SCIENCE NEWS 613, 614 (1968) describing gun ownership as
"simply beastly behavior", Braucher, "Gun Lunatics Silence
[the] Sounds of Civilization", MIAMI HERALD, July 19, 1982 and
testimony of the Presbyterian Church, USA that "There is no other
reason to own a handgun (that we have envisioned, at least) than to kill
someone with it." 1985-6 Hearings of Legislation to Modify the 1968
Gun Control Act, House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Crime, v. 1 at
128. See also DETROIT DAILY PRESS editorial, Jan. 22, 1968:

No private citizen has any reason or need at any time to
possess a gun. This applies to both honest citizens and criminals. We
realize the Constitution guarantees the "right to bear arms" but
this should be changed.

Polls consistently show public support for regulation that is at
once more stringent than that prevailing in the least gun- restrictive
states and less restrictive than that prevailing in the most restrictive;
i.e. a permit system that would seek to disarm felons, juveniles and the
mentally unstable as far as possible without denying ordinary responsible
citizens the right to choose to own a gun for family defense. Cf. Wright,
"Public Opinion and Gun Control: A Comparison of Results from Two
Recent Surveys", 455 ANNALS AMER. ACAD. OF POL. & SOC. SCI. 24
(1981), Bordua, "Adversary Polling and the Construction of Social
Meaning" 5 LAW & POL. Q. 345 (1983).

A Doctor's Horror: Death on the Loose", reprinted from THE
WASHINGTON POST by the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, May 14, 1989.

See, e.g. Murray, "Handguns, Gun Control Law and Firearm
Violence", 23 SOCIAL PROBLEMS 81 (1975); Lizotte & Bordua and
Bordua & Lizotte, above; Kleck, "The Relationship between Gun
Ownership Levels and Rates of Violence in the United States" in D.
Kates (ed.) FIREARMS AND VIOLENCE (1984); McDowall, Gun Availability and
Robbery Rates: A Panel Study of Large U.S. Cities, 1974-1978, 8 LAW &
POLICY Q. 135 (1986); Bordua, "Firearms Ownership and Violent Crime: A
Comparison of Illinois Counties" Kleck & Patterson, "The
Impact of Gun Control and Gun Ownership Levels on City Violence
Rates", a paper presented to the 1989 Annual Meeting of the American
Society of Criminology (available from the authors at Florida State
University School of Criminology). See also Eskridge, "Zero-Order
Inverse Correlations between Crimes of Violence and Hunting Licenses in the
United States", 71 SOCIOLOGY & SOCIAL RESEARCH 55 (1986).

As to the aberrance of homicide perpetrators, see the section of
this paper devoted to that issue. The estimate of handgun owner- murderers
is Prof. Gary Kleck's and derives from a comparison of handgun homicide
data to the number of respondents to the 1987 GSS Survey answering that
they personally owned a gun.

These estimates probably grossly over-estimate the number of legal
handgun owners who murder. After all, illegal gun owners (a group that
composes a very substantial proportion of murderers) are disproportionately
unlikely either to be asked to respond to a GSS Survey or to incriminate
themselves by honestly answering that they own a gun. Prof. Kleck was kind
enough to give me this set of estimates as a personal communication. It
will eventually appear in an as yet untitled book he is preparing for
Aldine de Guyter Press (c. 1991), hereinafter cited as Kleck-Aldine.

Braucher, MIAMI HERALD, July 19, 1982; see also his Oct. 29, 1981
column "Handgun Nuts are Just That -- Really Nuts."

Guest editorial by Senator Edward Kennedy, "Pusher's Best
Friend, the NRA", March 22, 1989 NEW YORK TIMES. See also P. Hamill,
NEW YORK POST, "A Meeting of NRA's Harlem Branch", April 4, 1989,
LOUISVILLE COURIER-JOURNAL MAGAZINE, Aug. 7, 1988, p. 6 ("The National
Rifle Association, its propagandists and it supporters work day and night
to make sure that every hood in the country can get his hands on a gun.
They couldn't be more guilty if they stood there slipping pistols to the
drug dealers and robbers. If justice were done, they would be in
prison."). In fact (though it has often obtusely opposed even
reasonable controls that affect law abiding citizens), the NRA has
consistently supported, indeed is the principal architect of, laws
comprehensively barring gun ownership by anyone who has been convicted of a
felony. Cf. 82 MICH. L. REV. 209-210 (citing state laws dating from the
early 20th Century and federal laws from the 1930s through the present
day).

A remark by N.Y. Governor Mario Cuomo who subsequently wrote the NRA
to apologize because it is unintelligent and unfair" to
"disparage any large group." TIME, May 27, 1985.

Editorial cartoon, MILWAUKEE JOURNAL, Jan. 22, 1989, p. 12J.

Ironically, the assassin, who was himself a gun control advocate,
was legally licensed in one of the highly restrictive states that (over the
NRA's fervent objection) require licensure to purchase a handgun. Moreover
he obtained his license as a security guard, a status that would carry
legal entitlement to a handgun under even the most stringent anti-gun
proposals. Jacobs, "Exceptions to a General Prohibition on Handgun
Possession" 49 LAW & CONTEMP. PROB. 5, 6-7 (1986).

See examples given and general discussion in Kates, "The Battle
over Gun Control", 84 THE PUBLIC INTEREST 42 (1986) (hereinafter cited
as "Gun Control", 84 THE PUBLIC INTEREST).

For instance, the principal spokesman for the National Coalition to
Ban Handguns claims a ban would reduce accidental because "law-abiding
citizens would then turn to safer long guns [i.e. rifles and shotguns] for
self-protection." Fields, "Handgun Prohibition and Social
Necessity", 23 ST.L.U.L.J. 23, 51 (1979) (emphasis added). In fact,
long guns are actually both far more dangerous when discharged and, for
various technical reasons, far more subject to accident. See discussion
below. Thus the effect if a handgun ban caused long gun substitution would
be to geometrically increase accidental gun fatalities. See discussion in
the section on gun accidents below.

For a similar analysis of the motivations underlying Prohibition,
see J. Gusfield, PROHIBITION: A SYMBOLIC CRUSADE.

Riley is unusually forthcoming on the issue: his 10,000 word
jeremiad against the handgun at least mentions enforcement. Indeed, he
devotes an entire sentence to the issue; he declares that there would be
enforcement will be "strict". Riley, Shooting to Kill the
Handgun: Time to Martyr Another American 'Hero'", 51 J. Urb. Law 491
(1974). Three other gun prohibitionists do seriously examine the issue --
but do not show demonstrate that a ban would be enforcible! Their views are
epitomized by Neier's admission that, because of the impossibility of
enforcement, "my proposal to ban all guns should probably be marked a
failure before it is even tried." A. Neier, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: A
RADICAL SOLUTION (1975) 79; see also D. Lunde, MURDER AND MADNESS (1976)
28-9 and R. Sherrill, THE SATURDAY NIGHT SPECIAL, 271-4.

Unless otherwise expressly stated, all references for this section
will be found in my much lengthier discussion of the topic, co-authored
with Dr. Nicole Varzos, "Aspects of the Priapic Theory of Gun
Ownership" in W. Tonso (ed.), THE GUN CULTURE AND ITS ENEMIES (1989).

While taking elephant, rhinoceros and similar animals requires
express rifles of .40 caliber or more .30 caliber non-express weapons
suffice for any North American game animal. Not coincidentally, American
manufacturers do not make express rifles and .30 caliber rifles are the
largest that would ever be owned by Americans, excepting the tiny minority
of African big game hunters. Likewise, barrel length of rifles and shotguns
is a function of the area in which they are expected to be used: long
barrelled guns tend are owned by those who hunt in open country where long
range accuracy is optimum; short barrelled guns are used in heavy brush
country where long barrels tend to snag when brought into action as game
are encountered suddenly and at close range.

Compare Olmsted, "Morally Controversial Leisure: The Social
World of Gun Collectors" 11 SYMBOLIC INTERACTION 277 (1988) to
Olmsted, "Stamp Collections and Stamp Collecting", paper
presented at the 1987 Annual Meeting of the Popular Culture
Association" (available from the author at University of Calgary,
Department of Sociology), Dannefer, "Rationality and Passion in
Private Experience: Modern Consciousness and the Social World of Old Car
Collectors", 27 SOCIAL PROBLEMS 392 (1980) and "Neither
Socialization Nor Recruitment: The Avocational Careers of Old Car
Collectors", 60 SOCIAL FORCES 395 (1981).

Compare the passage from the 10th Lecture (at 507 of THE MAJOR
WRITINGS OF SIGMUND FREUD, Great Books ed., 1952), which Dr. Tanay does
cite to S. Freud & D. Oppenheim, DREAMS IN FOLKLORE (1958) at 33.

See, e.g. Murray, "Handguns, Gun Control Law and Firearm
Violence", 23 SOCIAL PROBLEMS 81 (1975); Lizotte & Bordua and
Bordua & Lizotte, above; Kleck, "The Relationship between Gun
Ownership Levels and Rates of Violence in the United States" in D.
Kates (ed.) FIREARMS AND VIOLENCE (1984); McDowall, Gun Availability and
Robbery Rates: A Panel Study of Large U.S. Cities, 1974-1978, 8 LAW &
POLICY Q. 135 (1986); Bordua, "Firearms Ownership and Violent Crime: A
Comparison of Illinois Counties" Kleck & Patterson, "The
Impact of Gun Control and Gun Ownership Levels on City Violence
Rates", a paper presented to the 1989 Annual Meeting of the American
Society of Criminology (available from the authors at Florida State
University School of Criminology). See also Eskridge, "Zero-Order
Inverse Correlations between Crimes of Violence and Hunting Licenses in the
United States", 71 SOCIOLOGY & SOCIAL RESEARCH 55 (1986).

Thus the pamphlet HOW WELL DOES THE HANDGUN PROTECT YOU AND YOUR
FAMILY?, by M. Yeager and the Handgun Control Staff of the U.S. Conference
of Mayors, 1976 (hereinafter cited as HANDGUN CONTROL STAFF pamphlet)
asserts "The probability of being robbed, raped or assaulted is low
enough to seriously call into question the need for Americans to keep
loaded guns....", p. 1, emphasis in original; compare another Handgun
Control Staff pamphlet, J. Alviani & W. Drake, HANDGUN CONTROL: ISSUES
AND ALTERNATIVES at 7: "Certainly the fear of these crimes outweighs
the reality, and the need to possess a handgun becomes questionable."
See also testimony of former California Governor Edmund G.
("Pat") Brown Sr. in HEARINGS [on S. 2507] BEFORE THE SENATE
SUBCOMMITTEE TO INVESTIGATE JUVENILE DELINQUENCY, at 55-6 (1971).

Columnist Sydney Harris in the CHICAGO DAILY NEWS, April 11, 1967.
See also the views, cited earlier, of a distinguished historian that
"gun fetishists" are: "traitors, enemies of their own
patria"; "anti-citizens" arming "against their own
neighbors" -- "The gun nuts who write me say that their liberty
may have to be preserved against their own government, their own fellow
countrymen, someday ...".; and Williams and McGrath, "Why People
Own Guns", 26 JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION 22 (1976) (holding gun owners
"violence prone" because survey data shows them approve the use
of force to stop crime or aid its victims).

NIJ Evaluation at 120ff. It should be noted that the differences in
fear level are not overwhelming and that the fear differential in one of
the studies may be an artifact of its omitting women gun owners from the
comparison. See the critique of DeFronzo, "Fear of Crime and Handgun
Ownership", 17 CRIMINOLOGY 331 (1979) in Hill, Howell & Driver,
"Gender, Fear and Protective Gun Ownership" 23 CRIMINOLOGY 541
(1985). But see the finding that women gun owners are less afraid than
non-owners in Thompson, Bankston, Thayer-Doyle, Jenkins, "Single
Female Headed Households, Handgun Possession and the Fear of Rape", a
paper presented at the 1986 Annual Meeting of the Southern Sociological
Society (available from the authors at the Department of Sociology, La.
State U., Baton Rouge).

Huston, Geis & Wright, "The Angry Samaritans",
PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, June 1976. The percentage of the general public who owned
guns derives from Kleck-Aldine above, ch. 2, from separate percentages of
black and white gun owners given in Erskine, "The Polls: Gun
Control" 36 PUBLIC OPINION Q. 455, 459 (1972) on the assumption that
90% of the sample was white and 10% black.

Young, "Perceptions of Crime, Racial Attitudes and Firearms
Ownership", 64 SOCIAL FORCES 473 (1985). Kleck-Aldine above, ch. 2
criticizes this conclusion because the data cited did not exclude the
alternative possibility that the racist attitudes correlated not with gun
ownership per se but with the political conservatism of the particular set
of gun owners responding to the survey.

For state data please see Lizotte, Bordua and White, "Firearms
Ownership for Sport and Protection: Two Not So Divergent Models", 46
AM. SOC. REV. 499, 503 (1981). The several national datasets are analyzed
in Kleck-Aldine above, ch. 2.

As exemplified by the examples given in the text I use the terms
"husband", "wife", "mate" and
"spousal" to include not only actual, on-going and legal
marriages, but also "common law" marriage (which is legal in some
states, but not others) and "boyfriend-girlfriend", as well as
estranged and former versions of all these relationships.

All discussion of gun-armed self-defense in this paper is directed
to handguns because they are infinitely more efficacious for defense than
rifles or shotguns. In contrast to the unwieldy long gun, the short
barrelled handgun is much easier to bring into play at close quarters and
much harder for an assailant to wrest away. Consider the situation of a
woman holding an intruder at bay while trying to dial the police. With a
rifle, this is difficult and hazardous at best. Given only the two inch
barrel of a snub- nosed handgun to grasp, not even the strongest man can
lever it from a woman's grip before she shoots him. M. Ayoob, THE TRUTH
ABOUT SELF-PROTECTION (N.Y., Bantam: 1983) 332-3, 341-2, 345-55.

Thus Ramsey Clark denounces precautionary gun ownership as an
atavistic insult to American government: "A state in which a citizen
needs a gun to protect himself from crime has failed to perform its first
purpose."; it is "anarchy, not order under law -- a jungle where
each relies on himself for survival." R. Clark, CRIME IN AMERICA 88
(1971). For similar views, see also Wills, "Handguns that Kill",
WASHINGTON STAR, Jan. 18, 1981, "John Lennon's War", CHICAGO SUN
TIMES, Dec. 12, 1980 and "Or Worldwide Gun Control" PHILADELPHIA
INQUIRER, May 17, 1981; WASHINGTON POST editorial: "Guns and the
Civilizing Process", Sept. 26, 1972.

Warren v District of Columbia, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C. Ct. of Ap. 1981).
For similar cases from New York and Chicago, please see Riss v City of New
York, 22 N.Y. 2d 579, 293 NYS2d 897, 240 N.E. 2d 860 (N.Y. Ct. of Ap.
1958), Keane v City of Chicago, 98 Ill. App.2d 460, 240 N.E.2d 321 (1968).
See also the cases cited in the next two footnotes and Bowers v DeVito, 686
F.2d 61 (7 Cir. 1982) (no federal constitutional requirement that state or
local agencies provide sufficient police protection).

The ability of the state to protect us from personal violence
is limited by resources and personnel shortages [in addition to which] the
state is usually unable to know that we need protection until it is too
late. By the time that the police can be notified and then arrive at the
scene the violent criminal has ample opportunity to do serious harm. I once
waited 20 minutes for the New York City Police to respond to an "officer
needs assistance" call which has their highest priority. On the other hand,
a gun provides immediate protection. Even where the police are prompt and
efficient, the gun is speedier.

-- "The Ownership and Carrying of Personal Firearms", forthcoming in
INT'L. J. VICTIMOL. (emphasis added). Cf. the Riss and Silver cases cited
above, as well as Wong v City of Miami, 237 So.2d 132 (Fla., 1970), all
emphasizing the need for judicial deference to administrators allocating
scarce police resources as a reason for denying liability for failure to
protect.

Weiner v Metropolitan Transit Authority, 433 N.E. 2d 124, 127, 55
N.Y. 2d 175, 498 N.Y.S. 2d 141 (N.Y. App. Div. 1982). 77. The first
quotation is from a book by the Chairman of Handgun Control, Inc., Nelson
"Pete" Shields, GUNS DON'T DIE, PEOPLE DO 49 (1981) (emphasis in
original); the second is from Meredith, "The Murder Epidemic",
SCIENCE, Dec. 1986 at p. 46. The point appears as a leit motif throughout
the HANDGUN CONTROL STAFF pamphlet). To the same effect, please see Newton
& Zimring, above, at 68 and F. Zimring & G. Hawkins, THE CITIZEN'S
GUIDE TO GUN CONTROL (1987)(hereinafter Zimring & Hawkins-1987) at 31.

Reserved.

In 68-75% of instances the attacker is scared off without being shot
at all. SOCIAL PROBLEMS, above, at 4. See results reported and analyzed in
NIJ Evaluation above at 146 and Hardy, "Firearms Ownership and
Regulation: Tackling an Old Problem with Renewed Vigor", 20 WM. &
M. L. REV. 235 (1978). See generally "Policy Lessons", above, at
44. Even where attackers are shot, in more than 5 out of 6 instances they
are wounded rather than killed. Id., Cook, "The Case of the Missing
Victims: Gunshot Woundings in the National Crime Survey" 1 J. QUAN.
CRIM. 91, 94-96.

For the civilian-police comparisons see Silver and Kates,
"Handgun Ownership, Self-defense and the Independence of Women in a
Violent, Sexist Society" in D. Kates (ed.) RESTRICTING HANDGUNS (1979)
at 156. Robin, "Justifiable Homicide by Police Officers" at p.
295, n. 3 of M. Wolfgang, STUDIES IN HOMICIDE (1967) notes that 1920s
justifiable civilian homicides comprised 26.6% and 31.4% of all homicides
in Detroit and Chicago respectively and 32% of the total homicides in
Washington, D.C. in the period 1914-8.

Computation from the yearly Detroit homicide figures for
"Excusable" and "Justifiable: Civilian" homicides in
Dietz, above. Because about 10% of excusable homicides are non-culpable
accidental killings, in computing from the excusable column I have reduced
its total by 10%. See discussion of justifiable and excusable homicide in
Policy Lessons, above at 44.

See, e.g. SOCIAL PROBLEMS at 7-9, Wright, "Public Opinion and
Gun Control: A Comparison of Results from Two Recent National Surveys"
455 ANNALS OF THE AM. ACAD. POL. & SOC. SCI. 24 (1981), Hardy above and
Bordua, "Adversary Polling and the Construction of Social
Meaning", 5 LAW & POLICY Q. 345 (1983).

SOCIAL PROBLEMS at 7-9.

Id.

The survey was released by the National Institute of Justice in
summary form only. The entire survey with exhaustive analysis has been
privately published by Aldine de Guyter Press as J. Wright & P. Rossi,
ARMED AND CONSIDERED DANGEROUS: A SURVEY OF FELONS AND THEIR FIREARMS
(1986). The survey question and results cited appear at p. 154.

Id. at 145 and Table 7.2.

Emphasis added. This particular wording derives from the HANDGUN
CONTROL STAFF pamphlet at p. 1 and from the other Handgun Control Staff
publication, Alviani & Drake above at p. 8. But the same theme, often
expressed in virtually identical language, will be found in almost all
critical treatments of precautionary gun ownership. See, e.g. Rushforth, et
al. "Violent Death in a Metropolitan County" 297 NEW ENGLAND J.
MED. 531, 533 (1977), Drinan, "Gun Control: The Good Outweighs the
Evil", 3 CIVIL LIBERTIES REV. 44, 49 (1976) Shields above at 49-53 and
124-5.

It must be noted, however, that not all female defensive killings of
husbands are legal. The legality depends on whether the wife reasonably
anticipated that the husband's beating would cause her death or great
bodily harm. Even where the statutes classify wife beating as a felony her
proper resort is to seek prosecution; absent imminent danger of death or
great bodily harm, she must submit to beating rather than resist with
deadly force. People v Jones, 191 C.A.2d 478 (Cal. Ct. of Ap., 1961); see
generally Kates and Engberg, "Deadly Force Self Defense Against
Rape" 15 U.C.-DAVIS L. REV. 873, 876-7 (1982). When a wife kills only
after surviving numerous prior beatings it may be particularly difficult to
convince police or jury that she reasonably believed this time was
different -- even though the pattern of men who eventually kill their wives
is generally one of progressively more severe beatings until the final one.
Howard, above.

Daly & Wilson above at p. 15 and table 9.1 at p. 200.

Howard at 82-3, above; see also Saunders-1, above: "Men who
batter [wives] average 45 pounds heavier and 4 to 5 inches taller
than" their victim.

Cook, "The Role of Firearms in Violent Crime: An Interpretative
Review of the Literature" in M. Wolfgang and N. Weiler (ed.) CRIMINAL
VIOLENCE 269 (1982) 247, Wright "Second Thoughts About Gun
Control" 91 THE PUBLIC INTEREST 3, 32 (1988) ("Analysis of the
family homicide data reveals an interesting pattern. When women kill men,
they often use a gun. When men kill women, they usually do it in some more
degrading or brutalizing way -- such as strangulation or knifing.")
and Saunders, "Who Hits First and Who Suffers Most? Evidence for the
Greater Victimization of Women in Intimate Relationships", a paper
presented at the 1989 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology
(available from Daniel Saunders, M.D., Department of Psychiatry, University
of Wisconsin).

The handgun is rarely an effective instrument for protecting
the home against either the burglar or the robber because the former avoids
confrontation [by only striking unoccupied premises] and the latter
confronts too swiftly [for the victim to get his gun].

Compare Zimring & Hawkins-1987 at p. 31 (emphasis added): "it is
rare indeed that a household handgun actually stops the burglar [because he
strikes when the home is unoccupied], or the home robber who counts on
surprise and a weapon of his own." See also Riley and I. Block, above.

This is particularly true against a handgun whose short barrel makes
it both much harder to wrest away than a long gun and much easier to bring
into play at close quarters. See note above.

For instance, although less than 10% of burglars carry guns, Riley
conceptualizes what will ensue if householders with guns confront burglars
in terms of "'bedroom shootouts' [which will be] won by alert
desperadoes with drawn guns rather than the usually unwarned, sleepy-eyed
residents.", "Shooting to Kill the Handgun: Time to Martyr
Another American 'Hero'", 51 J. URBAN LAW 491, 497- 8; see also
Zimring & Hawkins-1987 at 31, I. Block, GUN CONTROL: ONE WAY TO SAVE
LIVES 10-12 (pamph. issued by Public Affairs Committee, 1976). Neither
these nor any other anti-gun treatment ever consider the possibility of a
victim with a gun being attacked by a felon without a gun.

U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics release "The Use of Weapons
in Committing Offenses (Jan. 1986) Table 6.

U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics release "The Crime of
Rape" (March, 1985).

U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics release "Violent Crime By
Stranger and Non-Strangers" (Jan. 1987). Note that this is a different
sample (covering the period 1982-4) and that the figure for armed
victimizations applies to all victims, not just women.

P. Quigley, ARMED AND FEMALE (1988), M. Ayoob, IN THE GRAVEST
EXTREME 38 (1980). Cf. J. Carmichel, THE WOMEN'S GUIDE TO HANDGUNS (N.Y.,
Bobbs-Merrill, 1982) 3-4: "...when it comes to shooting women are not
the weaker sex", noting that the leading woman's score equalled the
leading man's in recent Olympic handgun competition and that in college
shooting where "no distinction is made between men and women",
women are coming more and more to dominate...because women have certain
physical and mental characteristics that give them an edge over men.";
viz. patience, "excellent hand-eye coordination" and the
concentration to perform delicate motor functions time after time.

The handgun is rarely an effective instrument for protecting
the home against either the burglar or the robber because the former avoids
confrontation [by only striking unoccupied premises] and the latter
confronts too swiftly [for the victim to get his gun].

GUNS DON'T DIE, PEOPLE DO by Handgun Control Inc. Chairman Shields
(pp. 124-5). To the same effect, see e.g.,Riley, "Shooting to Kill the
Handgun: Time to Martyr Another American 'Hero'", 51 J. URBAN LAW 491,
497-8 (1972), Zimring & Hawkins-1987, Newton & Zimring and the
HANDGUN CONTROL STAFF pamphlet, above.

As discussed infra, the primary problem with the HANDGUN CONTROL
STAFF pamphlet is that the evidence upon which it posits the rate of injury
to gun-armed resisters is fundamentally flawed because it applies to
resistance with all kinds of weapons and does not allow breaking gun-armed
resistance out.

HANDGUN CONTROL STAFF pamphlet at 33. The pamphlet cites no
statistics to show that rapists are less likely than robbers or burglars to
injure or kill victims who resist; nor could they be since rapist, robber
and burglar are often one and the same. See, e.g., Bureau of Justice
Statistics releases HOUSEHOLD BURGLARY (Jan. 1985) and ROBBERY VICTIMS
(1987).

HANDGUN CONTROL STAFF pamphlet at 18; also at p. 2 (also in
italics).

HANDGUN CONTROL STAFF pamphlet at 17. See also pp. 16 and 18
respectively for the admonitions (again in original italics) that
"victims who take self-protective measures are more likely to be
injured than victims not using such measures." and that "a victim
is three times more likely to be injured when taking a self- protection
measure than when not." See also p. 11 ("the likelihood of being
seriously injured during a robbery is directly related to taking a measure
of self-protection" rather than submitting), 14 ("running away or
reasoning with the offender... are less likely to result in injury to the
victim."), p. 19 ("those taking a self- protective measure
accounted for 58% of the emergency room treatments and their injuries were
twice as serious, judged by the mean days of hospitalization") and
again on p. 19 (of victims hospitalized after rape, mugging or assault,
compared to non- resisters, "the seriousness of injury was five times
as great for those using a weapon for self-protection"), p. 30
(injuries in aggravated assault are "more likely to be serious if the
victim physically resists the offender.").

A point that the pamphlet never makes -- but which emerges quite
forcefully from neutral evaluations of the evidence -- is that submission
does not assure that the victim will escape injury or death. Felons may
injure victims at the outset to assure compliance with their demands and
foreclose resistance or may injure or execute them gratuitously. See. e.g.
Cook, "The Relationship Between Victim Resistance and Injury in
Non-Commercial Robbery", 15 J. LEGAL STUD. 405, 406 (1986).

To avoid confusion, it should be noted: that Handgun Control, Inc.,
currently the most important organization in the anti-gun lobby, has no
direct link to the Handgun Control Staff, a non- lobbying
"research" organization that fell into desuetude in the 1970s;
and that Professors Zimring and Hawkins are academic gun control advocates
with no direct link to either organization. The "give them what they
want" language is from GUNS DON'T DIE, PEOPLE DO by Handgun Control
Inc. Chairman Shields (pp. 124-5) which relies heavily on the Handgun
Control Staff's research. Zimring, Hawkins and Newton take the same
position; see also Riley, "Shooting to Kill the Handgun: Time to
Martyr Another American 'Hero'", 51 J. URBAN LAW 491, 497-8 (1972).

Zimring & Hawkins-1987 above at 15. Curiously they make this
point in discussing how guns aid weaker people to victimize stronger ones
-- a crime pattern that is comparatively rare, to say the very least. The
point is unaccountably missing from their later chapter on "Guns for
Self Defense" to which it is far more relevant.

SOCIAL PROBLEMS at 7-9. The National Crime Surveys are conducted
under auspices of the National Institute of Justice (NIJ). Census Bureau
interviewers contact a nationally representative sample of about 60,000
households every six months and record information from personal interviews
concerning the crime victimization experience of all household members aged
twelve or older. Cook "The Relationship Between Victim Resistance and
Injury in Non-Commercial Robbery", 15 J. LEGAL STUD. 405, 406 (1986).

Their views have been strongly criticized by a female criminologist
(who is, nevertheless, not pro-gun) on the ground that for victims to
submit encourages crime. Ziegenhagen and Brosnan, "Victim Responses to
Robbery and Crime Control Policy", 23 CRIMINOLOGY 675, 677-8 (1985).

"Gun Control", 84 THE PUBLIC INTEREST, above, at 45 and
46.

A recent U.S Department of Justice study concludes that, over their
lifetimes, 83% of American children now aged 12 will be victims of some
kind of violent felony, and 52% of them will suffer two or more such
offenses, while 87% will have property stolen on 3 or more occasions; in
all these crime categories blacks will be much more frequently victimized
than whites. N.Y. TIMES, March 9, 1987 n. above 13. Compare Sherman,
"Free Police from the Shackles of 911", WALL STREET JOURNAL,
March 20, 1987: Minneapolis police records show that in 1986 "23% of
all the robberies, 15% of all the rapes and 19% of all the assaults and
disturbances" occurred repetitively at only .3% of the city's
commercial and residential addresses; "a mere 5% of all the addresses
... produced 64% of all the calls for police service." Needless to
say, it is unlikely that any of those who have to live or work at those
repetitive victimization addresses are white male academics.

See, e.g. "'There's This Place in the Queens Its Not Such a
Good Idea to Rob'" WALL STREET JOURNAL, Oct. 20, 1971 (Puerto Rican
shopkeeper reported to have shot more violent criminals in a year than had
any New York City police officer in an entire career).

R. Markman & D. Bosco, ALONE WITH THE DEVIL 342ff., (1989);
indeed, 17% of all Japanese homicide consists in children so killed by
their parents. Jameson, "Parent-Child Suicides Frequent in
Japan", March 28, 1981 HARTFORD COURANT.

Likewise studies of geographical areas within the U.S. should show
those with higher gun ownership having more murder. Yet the consistent
result of studies attempting to link gun ownership to violence rates is
either no relationship or a negative one, i.e. that urban and other areas
with higher gun ownership have less violence than demographically
comparable areas with lower gun ownership. See, e.g. Murray,
"Handguns, Gun Control Law and Firearm Violence", 23 SOCIAL
PROBLEMS 81 (1975); Lizotte & Bordua and Bordua & Lizotte, above;
Kleck, "The Relationship between Gun Ownership Levels and Rates of
Violence in the United States" in D. Kates (ed.) FIREARMS AND VIOLENCE
(1984); McDowall, Gun Availability and Robbery Rates: A Panel Study of
Large U.S. Cities, 1974-1978, 8 LAW & POLICY Q. 135 (1986); Bordua,
"Firearms Ownership and Violent Crime: A Comparison of Illinois
Counties" Kleck & Patterson, "The Impact of Gun Control and
Gun Ownership Levels on City Violence Rates", a paper presented to the
1989 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology (available from
the authors at Florida State University School of Criminology). See also
Eskridge, "Zero-Order Inverse Correlations between Crimes of Violence
and Hunting Licenses in the United States", 71 SOCIOLOGY & SOCIAL
RESEARCH 55 (1986).

For discussion of U.S, Swiss and Israeli law and practice see Kates,
"Handgun Prohibition and the Original Meaning of the Second
Amendment", 82 MICH. L. REV. 204 at n. 193 and 264ff.; cf. "Swiss
Army: A Privilege of Citizenship" LOS ANGELES TIMES p. 1, Oct. 1,
1980, "Israeli Official Urges Firearm in Every Home, GUN WEEK, June
29, 1979; "Order by Israel Puts Even More Guns on the Street",
LOS ANGELES TIMES, July 5, 1978.

The anti-self-defense basis of Anglo-American gun control theory is so
unique that it produces profound differences not only in policy and
administration from those prevailing in other countries but also in
understanding superficially similar gun laws. One such deceptive similarity
is that the laws in New York City, England, Switzerland and Israel all
require a permit to own a handgun. Indicative of the profound differences
between those requirement is that: permit issuance for the purpose of
personal defense is routine in Israel and Switzerland, administratively
discouraged by New York City and non-existent in England. In 1984 an attack
on a Jerusalem cafe by three terrorists armed with automatic weapons was
terminated when handgun-carrying Israeli civilians shot them down. THE
ECONOMIST, Ap. 7, 1984, p. 34.

Equally significant are differences in policy re civilian possession of
automatic weapons. Either an ordinary rifle or an assault rifle or other
fully automatic weapon requires a permit in England; since 1934 possession
of a fully automatic weapon in the United States has required registration
and been subject to a prohibitive tax and as of 1986 purchasing new assault
rifles or other fully automatic weapons is totally forbidden in the United
States. But in Switzerland and Israel the government distributes automatic
weapons to the general population by the millions. I was once asked by a
puzzled Israeli why Americans think they have to personally own guns:
"if they have to live or be in dangerous areas why don't they just
check a handgun or submachine gun out of the police armory?" The idea
that American law would seek to prevent law-abiding citizens threatened by
violence from arming themselves had never occurred to him and, on
explanation proved incomprehensible.

See generally Gurr, "Historical Trends in Violent Crime: A
Critical Review of the Evidence", in 3 ANNUAL REVIEW OF CRIME AND
JUSTICE (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1981), C. Greenwood, FIREARMS CONTROL: A
STUDY OF ARMED CRIME AND FIREARMS CONTROL IN ENGLAND AND WALES ch. 1-3
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), Morn, "Firearms Use and
Police: An Historic Evolution of American Values" in FIREARMS AND
VIOLENCE above at 496-501.

Morn, id., Kates, "Toward A History of Handgun Prohibition in
the United States" in RESTRICTING HANDGUNS above at 13-4.

For instance, in the South, the region of the United States which
from earliest times had the highest murder rates, gun law experimentation
included: the only state law that completely banned handgun sales (S.C.,
1902; repealed 1966); the earliest bans on "Saturday Night
Specials" (Tennessee, 1870; Arkansas, 1881; Alabama, 1893; Texas,
1907; Virginia, 1925); the earliest registration laws (Mississippi, 1906;
Georgia, 1913; N.C., 1917); and three states in which a permit was required
to purchase a handgun (N.C. 1917; Missouri, 1919; Arkansas, 1923).

Greenwood, Morn, above.

Monckkonen, "Diverging Homicide Rates: England and the United
States" in T. Gurr, VIOLENCE IN AMERICA v. 1 at 81 (1989). He rejects
gun ownership as a reason for the homicide differential citing a point that
it made below in greater detail: even those who see guns as the reason do
not contend that their removal could reduce American homicide by more than
50%; yet if American homicide were reduced by 50%, its rate would still be
500% greater than the British rate.

Naturally, anti-gun academic crusaders do not credit the
availability of guns in the U.S. for its relative lack of political
violence. They (quite correctly) attribute that to socio-cultural and
institutional differences between the U.S. and Europe. Yet it does not
occur to the anti-gun academic crusaders to attribute international crime
differentials to socio-cultural and institutional differences rather than
differential gun ownership.

For instance, in 1974, when the total U.S. population was 211
million, handguns were involved in c. 11,125 murders (54% of all murders).
By 1988 the total U.S. population was 245 million and handguns were
involved in c. 8,275 murders (45% of all murders), a 27% decline in handgun
homicide. Homicide by all means had declined almost 10%. In the 20 year
period 1966-1985 murders with guns declined from 64.8% of the total murder
rate to 58.7%.

Compare Monckkonen, above at 81 to the International Intentional
Homicide Table, below.

Browne & Flewelling, "Women as Victims or Perpetrators of
Homicide" a paper presented to the 1986 Annual Meeting of the American
Society of Criminology (available from the Family Res. Lab., U. of New
Hampshire). Straus, "Domestic Violence and Homicide Antecedents",
62 BULL. N.Y. ACAD. MED. 446, 450 (1986), Brown & Williams, above.

Zimring (U. CHI. L. REV.), above, Alviani & Drake, above and
references cited in the next section of this paper.

THE ECONOMIST, Ap. 7, 1984, p. 34. Compare: N.Y. TIMES July 8, 1986:
"Man With a Sword Kills 2 on Staten Island Ferry" (deranged Cuban
refugee kills 2, wounds 9 before being stopped by bystander who was
licensed to carry gun) and SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER July 15, 1986, p. 1:
"Tragedy Ends Love Triangle" (gunman who apparently intended to
kill his ex-girlfriend and her current boyfriend's family entered their
residence in early a.m. hours armed with silenced guns and explosives and
wearing a bullet-proof vest; gunman killed by 13 year old boy who armed
himself after the gunman had wounded his father and killed the girlfriend
and the boy's older brother).

This was denied by anti-gun advocate Mike Royko in a facetious
column that appeared shortly after the Post Office massacre. Royko
derisively claimed that, given Oklahoma's "weak" gun laws, the
gunman should have been shot down by his victims if gun armed self defense
really works. But regardless of state law, the federal Gun Control Act of
1968 prohibits possession of a gun in a federal building. Perhaps this
policy is cost-beneficial overall. But in the massacre situation its cost
was that the only armed person in the Post Office was the killer who was
not deterred by the prospect of having to violate the law.

Lindsay, "The Case for Federal Firearms Control" (1973) p.
22 (emphasis added). Citing Lindsay, the National Coalition to Ban Handguns
pamphlet "A Shooting Gallery Called America" asserts that
"each year" thousands of "gun murders [are] done by
law-abiding citizens who might have stayed law-abiding if they had not
possessed firearms." (emphasis in original); and "that most
murders are committed by previously law abiding citizens where the killer
and the victim are related or acquainted." See also Edwards,
"Murder and Gun Control", 18 WAYNE STATE U. LAW REV. 1335 (1972).

Kairys "A Carnage in the Name of Freedom", PHILADELPHIA
INQUIRER, September 12, 1988, emphasis added. Mr. Kairys is a lawyer and
part-time teacher of sociology.

See discussion below and Lane, "On the Social Meaning of
Homicide Trends in America" in T. Gurr VIOLENCE IN AMERICA v. 1 59
(1989) ("...the psychological profile of the accident-prone suggests
the same kind of aggressiveness shown by most murderers."). For
discussion of gun accident fatality see the next section of this paper.

Set out in tabular form in D. Mulvihill, et al. CRIMES OF VIOLENCE:
REPORT OF THE TASK FORCE ON INDIVIDUAL ACTS OF VIOLENCE (Washington, D.C.,
Gov't. Printing Office, 1969) at 532.

Police have traditionally been loathe to arrest in such situations;
moreover, in upwards of 50% even of relatively serious cases the police
have no opportunity to make an arrest because the victim fails to report
the matter (out of belief that the matter is a private affair, or that the
police will not take action, or out of fear of retaliation). See the U.S.
Bureau of Justice Statistics releases, "Family Violence" (April,
1984), "Preventing Domestic Violence Against Women" (August,
1986) and "Violent Crime By Strangers and Non-Strangers"
(January, 1987), all based on survey responses rather than reports to
police.

Browne & Williams, "Resource Availability for Women at
Risk: Its Relationship to Rates of Female-Perpetrated Partner
Homicide", a paper presented at the 1987 annual meeting of the
American Society of Criminology (available from the authors at the Family
Research Laboratory, University of New Hampshire).

Straus, "Domestic Violence and Homicide Antecedents", 62
BULLETIN OF THE N.Y. ACADEMY OF MEDICINE 446, 454, 457 (1986) and Straus,
"Medical Care Costs of Intrafamily Assault and Homicide", 62 N.Y.
ACAD. OF MED. 556, 557 fn. (1986). For a detailed review of relevant
studies see Browne & Flewelling, "Women as Victims or Perpetrators
of Homicide", a paper presented at the 1986 annual meeting of the
American Society of Criminology (available from the authors at the Family
Research Laboratory, University of New Hampshire).

Current Research, above, 203 (in T. Gurr VIOLENCE IN AMERICA v. 1).

Both this and the preceding quote are from the National Coalition to
Ban Handguns undated, unpaginated pamphlet "A Shooting Gallery Called
America".

Lindsay, "The Case for Federal Firearms Control" (1973) p.
22.

Cf. the FBI four year national homicide data set out in Mulvihill,
et al., above, at 532. Lindsay's reference gives no specific page citation
for the 1972 UNIFORM CRIME REPORT. His 73% figure is directly contradicted
by the special "Careers in Crime" data appearing at pp. 35-8 of
that REPORT and the other F.B.I. data discussed above. Please note,
incidentally, that neither the 1972 REPORT nor any other FBI publication
gives figures for the percentage of family and/or acquaintance murders that
are committed with guns. The 1972 REPORT does contain a figure for the
overall number of murders in which a gun was used but it is 65% not Mayor
Lindsay's 73%.

Emphasis added. The language quoted is from the Abstract to J.
Wright, P. Rossi & K. Daly, WEAPONS, CRIME AND VIOLENCE IN AMERICA:
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office: 1981),
published as a separate document accompanying the main NIJ Evaluation. It
does not appear in haec verba in the revised commercially published version
(UNDER THE GUN); but see pp. 192-4 and 321-2 thereof.

See e.g. "Policy Lessons" 49 LAW & CONTEMPORARY
PROBLEMS at 40-1, 59-60 (gun policy should focus on such high-risk owners,
outlawing their possession of all guns, not just handguns).

VIOLENCE: Kids with Guns" produced by Films for the Humanities
and Sciences, Inc., Princeton, N.J.

Teret & Wintemute, above at 346.

The National Safety Council only began breaking handgun accidents
out of the total number of accidental gun fatalities in 1979. The 246
figure given in the text represents the average for identifiable accidental
handgun for 1979 and succeeding years.

Kleck-Aldine, above, Table 7.5 (figures for 1980 derived from Prof.
Kleck's review of Public Health Service computerized detail tapes). Compare
the Center for Disease Control's figure that accidents with handguns and
long guns combined killed 34 children under age five in 1984.
"Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report" for March 11, 1988 at p.
145. It should be noted that, while the number of accidental long gun
fatalities is clearly substantially higher, the figures given for handgun
deaths may understate the phenomenon since in many accidental gun
fatalities it is undetermined whether the weapon was handgun or a long gun.

See the Centers for Disease Control, "Mortality and Morbidity
Weekly Report" for March 11, 1988 at pp. 144-5.

U.S. Public Health Service, ALCOHOL AND HEALTH (1978), p. 4; see
discussion and citations in Kates, "Handgun Banning and the
Prohibition Experience" in FIREARMS AND VIOLENCE, above at pp. 143-4.

To analyze enforceability requires analyzing two sub-issues: the
likelihood of voluntary compliance; and the ease with which a handgun ban
can be enforced against the non-compliant. As to the first sub-issue,
massive resistance can be expected since people believe (whether rightly or
not is irrelevant) that they urgently need a handgun for their family's
defense and that a handgun ban would itself be illegal as against the
constitutional right to arms. In contrast, no one but alcoholics
"need" liquor and Prohibition was clearly legal, having been
enacted as a constitutional amendment. As to enforcement against the non-
compliant, liquor is consumed by use so continuing to use it required
violators to take relatively high viability step to buy more liquor. In
contrast, it would require unconstitutional house- to-house searches to
find and confiscate the upwards of 70 million extant handguns. For those
who do not already own one buying it requires only a single purchase -- and
if handguns were smuggled in at the rate at which marijuana is estimated to
be, 20 million new handguns would be available for purchase each year. See
discussion in "Handgun Banning and the Prohibition Experience",
id at 144-166.

"... the psychological profile of the accident-prone suggests
the same kind of aggressiveness shown by most murderers." Lane,
"On the Social Meaning of Homicide Trends in America" in T. Gurr
VIOLENCE IN AMERICA v. 1, p. 59 (1989). See also J. Wilson & R.
Herrnstein, CRIME AND HUMAN NATURE (1985): "Young men who drive
recklessly and have many accidents tend to be similar to those who commit
crimes."

Cf. Bruce-Briggs, "The Great American Gun War", 45 THE
PUBLIC INTEREST 37, 40 (1976):

The calculation of family homicides and accidents as costs of
gun ownership is false. The great majority of these killings are among
poor, restless, alcoholic, troubled people, usually with long criminal
records. Applying the domestic homicide rate of these people to the
presumably upstanding citizens whom they prey upon is seriously
misleading.

For handgun prohibition arguments based on the belief that handguns
are as lethal as long guns see, e.g. Christoffel & Christoffel,
"Handguns: Risks versus Benefits" 77 PEDIATRICS 781, 872 (1986)
and Baker, "Without Guns Do People Kill People?" 75 AM. J. PUB.
HEALTH 587 (1985). For handgun prohibition arguments based on the belief
that handguns are even more lethal than long guns ("uniquely
lethal") see Wintemute, "Firearms as a Cause of Death in the
United States, 27 J. OF TRAUMA 532, 536 (1987) and Teret & Wintemute,
"Handgun Injuries: The Epidemiologic Evidence for Assessing Legal
Responsibility", 6 HAMLINE L. REV. 341, 349-50 (1983).

Fields, 23 ST.LOUIS U.LAW J. above at 51.

Children and Handguns: A Public Health Concern", 139 AMERICAN
JOURNAL OF DISEASES OF CHILDREN 229 (March, 1985) and a reply to a letter
to the editor printed in The Pediatric Forum section of the Jan., 1986
issue. Significantly, the first article repeatedly supports its assertions
by references to publications by anti-gun lobbyists or propaganda
organizations. Significantly, at least three of these assertions are either
demonstrably false or highly misleading.

Writing in 1979, Field had access to the National Safety Council's
annual ACCIDENT FACTS publications which listed firearm accident fatalities
for 1976-8 as (respectively) 2,059, 1,982 and 1,806. This averages out to
1950. (The lower average I give in the text reflects the c. 1825 accidental
gun fatalities per year in the years since.)

The estimate that handguns comprise c. 90% of the loaded guns at any
time comes from raw data in Bordua's survey research among Illinois gun
owners; see also 82 MICH. LAW REV. above at 263. As to the number of fatal
handgun accidents annually, the National Safety Council only began breaking
out a separate figure in 1979. In that and the successive years there were
an average of 246 identifiable accidental handgun deaths out of an average
1825 fatal gun accidents overall. Although the number of long gun
fatalities is clearly substantially higher, this 246 figure may understate
the phenomenon since in many accidental gun fatalities it is undetermined
whether the weapon was handgun or a long gun. See Kleck-Aldine, ch. 7
("Firearms Accidents") above.

As to (b) the correct figure is 13.5% not 90% (see last footnote)
and as to (a) it is c. 40% not 20%. See NIJ Evaluation, Table 2-5 at p. 42,
and preceding comment (p. 41) that "Although there is much
disagreement in the literature over the total number of [guns], there is a
fair consensus over the relative proportions" of handguns vs. long
guns.

As suggested by my quotation marks, the purported FBI publication
she cites does not appear to exist. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, I
assume what she is citing, as if they were one document, are the annual
Uniform Crime Reports issued by FBI for each of the years 1963-73. But
these Reports give data on law enforcement and crime only. They do not --
nor does the FBI at all -- compile figures for accidents (with guns or
otherwise) or for gun ownership in general; nor does the FBI provide
comparative breakdowns for handgun vs. long gun accidents nor for handgun
vs. long gun ownership.

Nor should readers be misled by the fact that the Uniform Crime Reports
deal with crime into crediting Dr. Shetsky's claim that they show handguns
account for "90% of all firearms misuse, both criminal and
accidental" (my emphasis). No such figure is given in the Uniform
Crime Reports cited; in fact those Reports did not regularly breakdown any
category of gun crime into long vs. handgun. Some (but not all) of those
Reports did so breakdown gun homicides and the 1967 Report gave such a
breakdown for gun robbery and aggravated assault as well. But neither
altogether nor separately do the figures cited in any of the cited Reports
correspond to those given by Dr. Shetsky. The facts are both that available
data on this subject are insufficient to support the kind of estimate she
is making -- and that they clearly do not support her figure. See
discussion in ch. 9 of the NIJ Evaluation.

Lizotte, "The Costs of Using Gun Control to Reduce
Homicide" 62 BULL. N.Y. ACAD. MED. 539, 541 (1986) (using Kleck's
figures for long gun vs. handgun lethality which differ from mine in being
based on a range of more exhaustive and sophisticated ballistic comparisons
that do not, however, include medical study data).

Above at 322-3 (emphasis in original).

Over the past two decades, while New York City has made it virtually
impossible for an ordinary merchants and citizens to have guns in their
stores or homes, it secretly granted permits to actually carry a concealed
handgun anywhere at any time to: Arthur Sulzberger (publisher of the New
York Times whose public position is that no civilian needs or can use a gun
for defense), Dr. Milton Brothers (husband of Joyce Brothers whose public
position is that gun ownership is motivated by male sexual dysfunction),
Donald Trump, Arthur Godfrey, Henry Cabot Lodge, William Buckley, Lyman
Bloomingdale, Joan Rivers, a host of local union leaders, politicians,
media figures and other celebrities, and various DuPonts and Rockefellers.
There is no testing for competence with firearms or for knowledge of when
they can and cannot legally be used. Kates, "The Battle Over Gun
Control", 84 THE PUBLIC INTEREST 42, 44-7 (1986).